The Crime Is Mine: A frothy period romp

The Crime Is Mine (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Unrated, equivalent to PG-13 for sexual candor and brief nudity 

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

This is way too much fun.

 

Director François Ozon’s frothy period farce is many things: an homage to 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies, and a canny nod to the tempestuous cinema transition from silents to talkies, along with a cheeky soupçon of contemporary gender issues.

 

Crafty attorney Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder, right) isn't about to let best friend
Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) be convicted of a crime she didn't
commit ... or did she?

Oh, and it’s also a murder mystery.

The result is joyously entertaining, thanks both to a sharp script by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo — adapting Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play, Mon Crime — and effervescent performances by the entire cast. Traces of the original stage production are evident (which must’ve been a hoot, back in the day), but the presentation never feels cramped; Ozon, production designer Jean Rabasse and cinematographer Manual Dacosse “open up” the story in a manner that’s far more cinema than theater.

 

The setting is Paris, the year 1935. Struggling actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkeiwicz) and best friend Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), an unemployed lawyer, share a cramped flat and owe 3,000 francs in five months’ back rent. Their oafish landlord, Pistole (Franck De Lapersonne), seems willing to take it out in trade, but — harumph! — Madeleine and Pauline aren’t that sort of gals.

 

While Pauline verbally jousts with Pistole, Madeleine is in trouble elsewhere; we see her hastily depart the lavish estate of famed theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet). She’s disheveled and clearly distraught. Upon returning to their flat, she tearfully explains that Montferrand offered her a bit part only if she’d become his mistress; we she refused, he tried to rape her, and she fled.

 

Madeleine’s longtime boyfriend André Bonnard (Édouart Sulpice) shows up — he’s heir to the Bonnard Tire corporation — but is scarcely a comfort. 400,000 francs in debt, thanks to bad luck at the horse track, the only “solution” offered by his father (André Dussollier) is an arranged marriage with Berthe Courteil, which — conveniently — will pump millions of francs into the ailing Bonnard factory operation.

 

But that’s okay, André insists, to the shattered Madeleine; we’ll still see each other for at least one meal per day ... as my mistress. (The cad! The bounder!)

 

Enter police Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalés), who arrives with the news that Montferrand has been found dead, murdered by a single gunshot ... and isn’t it rather suspicious, that Madeleine owns a gun with one chamber fired? 

 

Mais non, the young woman insists. But then, after an unsatisfied Brun departs, Pauline takes her friend aside ... and a plan is hatched.

The French Dispatch: Impenetrable language barrier

The French Dispatch (2021) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated R, for graphic nudity, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.29.21

Although one can only marvel, gape-jawed, at the feverish, coordinated complexity of set and backdrop movement, carefully composed and choreographed actor placement, traveling camerawork and integrated miniatures — relentlessly, as this aggressively bizarre film proceeds — all this visual razzmatazz rapidly wears out its welcome.

 

Magazine editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray, left) listens while star journalist
Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright, right) defends his turn of phrase; both are ignored
by another staffer who serves more as background decoration, given that he never
has written a word.

A classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

There’s never been any doubt that Wes Anderson, as a filmmaker, is obsessed with eccentricity and kitsch; his cinematic visions generally occupy a universe several steps beyond traditionally heightened reality. When he succeeds, the result can be a bravura work of genius, as with The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

When he slides off the rails, as with this one, we’re left with nothing but contrived and relentlessly mannered weirdness for its own sake. Which doesn’t work.

 

Worse yet, despite all the marvelous eye candy, this film is boring. Crushingly boring.

 

It looks like half of Hollywood wanders through this self-indulgent vanity project, sometimes for no more than a minute or so. You could spend the entire film just trying to identify everybody (and, at times, that’s more interesting than trying to follow the outré storytelling).

 

In fairness, the premise and narrative gimmick are delectable. In a setting that seems 1950s-ish, The French Dispatch is a widely circulated American magazine based in the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, lovingly overseen by quietly cranky, Kansas-born editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).

 

If Anderson’s vision begins to feel like a love letter to the venerable New Yorker magazine, during its 1950s and ’60s heyday, well … that’s undoubtedly intentional.

 

As the film begins, Howitzer has just died. The staff journalists — hand-picked over the years, sometimes less for their writing chops, and more for the way they lend atmosphere to the voluminous offices — assemble to draft his obituary, and prepare the magazine’s final issue. We then watch the three primary feature stories crafted, over time, by writers who embedded themselves, and became part of their assignments.

 

The generous application of flashbacks allows Murray plenty of screen time, as he fine-tunes each piece. His traditional advice, to each scribe: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” (You’ve gotta love that line.)

 

We open with a brief travelogue, as Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), the “Cycling Reporter,” takes us on a guided tour of Ennui-sur-Blasé: along the way relating the city’s history, while proudly highlighting many of the seedier neighborhoods, and their often wacky inhabitants.

 

This entertaining sequence showcases the astonishing work by production designer Adam Stockhausen, supervising art director Stéphane Cressend and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, who (I hope) was paid by the mile, because he must’ve been run off his feet.

Burn After Reading: Combustible!

Burn After Reading (2008) • View trailer for Burn After Reading
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, sexual content and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.12.08
Buy DVD: Burn After Reading • Buy Blu-Ray: Burn After Reading [Blu-ray]

Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer is worth the price of admission.

In a wickedly hilarious film laden with clueless characters, his numbskull fitness center employee is to die for: an arrested adolescent and (no doubt) high school drop-out, with a trusting, ingenuous smile, a little-girl giggle and an absolute refusal to allow his lack of wisdom or intelligence to interfere with even the wildest notion that might pop into his head.

Believing they have something of interest to the Russian Embassy, Chad
Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) dress nicely for
their first meeting with an obviously suspicious intermediary, who can't figure
out whether to take his two guests seriously, or dismiss them as lunatics. The
Russians aren't alone; as this story progresses, nobody knows quite what to
make of the opportunistic meatheads who populate this gleeful farce.

Chad's view of the world obviously is based solely on a youthful diet of movies and TV shows, and his beatific ignorance is a work of thespic art.

Watching this guy "help" fitness center patrons will make even the hardiest soul wince, because it's blindingly obvious that Chad's "expert advice" to unwary exercisers is anything but, and that his efforts to assist a customer while stretching and straining are likely to do actual physical harm.

Pitt is but one of the many delights in Burn After Reading, a welcome return to the exaggerated dark farce that the Coen brothers delivered so well in Fargo.

Burn After Reading doesn't have the core "straight" characters who also made Fargo so engaging; the primary players here are broadly drawn burlesques, with a few well-meaning innocent bystanders thrown in for contrast. The resulting film belongs in the company of Wag the Dog and Dr. Strangelove: pictures that mercilessly skewer the American political and intelligence networks with such gleeful panache that we're gulled into dismissing them as cynical larks ... while secretly hoping that things really aren't that bad.

The chaos begins on an average day at CIA headquarters in Arlington, Va., as mid-level analyst Osborne "Ozzie" Cox (John Malkovich) is ambushed by a demotion. Not one to take such news lightly, he resigns in a fit of profanity-laden pique and returns home to begin what he hopes will be some seriously scandalous memoirs.

Truth be told, his security clearance never was high enough for the CIA to be concerned about such stuff and nonsense, but hey, Ozzie's also not the sharpest pencil in the box. Merely the one with the nastiest temper.

Ozzie's sudden unemployment comes as an unpleasant surprise to his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), a pediatrician — and picturing this woman interacting with small children is another scary thought, once we get to know her — well into an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a mildly paranoid U.S. federal marshal married to a popular children's book author.

Harry also is a serial philanderer who gets nervous when Katie seizes on Ozzie's meltdown as the excuse to finally proceed with her long-planned divorce.