Gigantic is littered with dead and loose ends, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were the quasi-freeform jazz of a Cassavetes or even an Apatow wannabe, but is a considerable problem when taking into account the crispness of the film's aesthetics. The clean 'scope compositions and fat-free performances become increasingly incongruous; by the time the movie stops short with everything and nothing resolved, you're convinced that the filmmakers snatched a script out of the oven half-cooked after a window of opportunity opened up, not-unreasonably convinced that their cinematic faculties would see them through. Co-producer Paul Dano, suddenly charismatic and borderline handsome (going toe-to-toe with Daniel Day-Lewis evidently did wonders for him), is Brian, a single, 28-year-old mattress salesman who inexplicably dreams of adopting a Chinese baby; Zooey Deschanel, in a career-best turn, is a spacey, baby-voiced sexpot named Happy; and a finally-funny-again John Goodman is Happy's crass millionaire father, whose need for a bed brings Brian into contact with his daughter. Fundamentally, Gigantic is about two lonely people coming together, and there's promise in how it inverts the Knocked Up formula by making Brian the expectant parent and Happy a maturity-deprived bachelorette. But there are just too many pointless writerly indulgences--including a derelict seemingly manifested from Brian's subconscious who shows up to terrorize him at regular intervals, and a scene set in a massage parlour I can't see surviving the channels of distribution except as a DVD supplement--cluttering up the narrative. Gigantic? More like "bloated." PROGRAMME: Discovery

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Mickey Rourke has spent the aughties staging a series of mini-comebacks, but they've mostly sidestepped his iconography in favour of transforming him into a character actor. Not so Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is poignant largely for how it reflects and refracts the Mickey Rourke mystique. Quite aware of his film's ghoulish appeal, Aronofsky, after spotlighting the visage of young, beautiful Mickey Rourke under the main titles, shields Rourke's face from view long enough that even though we know what he looks like now (that detour into prizefighting and God knows how many botched surgeries really took their toll), his first close-up still causes momentary grief. But the film is not just about lost youth, Rourke's or otherwise (44-year-old Marisa Tomei, reacquainting Before the Devil Knows You're Dead viewers with her breasts, God bless her, plays the kind of stripper pitied by her clientele): it's about how the culture of '80s nostalgia--arguably the dominant culture--is like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, retarded and unable to resist squeezing the life out of Reagan-era totems. Wrestling, meanwhile, proves to be the perfect analogue for acting in that its Golden Age, like Rourke's, was somewhere around 1987, the year of Angel Heart and WrestleMania III; when Rourke's washed-up Randy "The Ram" Robinson, permanently cast out of the ring by a heart attack, challenges a neighbourhood kid to a game of Nintendo wrestling, suffice it to say the conflation of relics is nothing less than poetic. The credits for cinematographer Maryse Alberti and editor Andrew Weisblum--Aronofsky normally collaborates with the flashier Matthew Libatique and Jay Rabinowitz, respectively--suggest a certain putting-away of toys for the director, who confines his intercutting technique to one dazzling sequence (juxtaposing an exhibition match with its locker-room aftermath, it unfolds like the love scene from Don't Look Now) and seems to have a renewed faith in subtext, as indicated by the puny supermarket manager (Todd Barry) who humiliates Ram at every opportunity ("Don't you spend Saturdays sitting on other guy's faces?" he says in response to Ram's request for an extra shift), clearly but not explicitly seeing Ram as some proxy for the school bully. That's what makes a subplot involving Ram's attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, who's slowly being remade, Vertigo-style, into a Dita Von Teese clone by boyfriend Marilyn Manson) such a glaring misstep: virtually the first words out of her mouth are a painfully expositional summary of Ram's failings as a parent, and she's shown the exit in a way that hastens as well as cheapens Ram's inevitable relapse. Nevertheless, the pathos of those final shots feels earned; The Wrestler bears out as the most haunting sports film, or rather the most haunting film about the margins of a sport, since Fat City. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis' 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my heart sank a little when I saw that Declan Quinn, collaborating with Demme for the first time outside the documentary realm, had replaced the man who's photographed almost every one of Demme's fiction features to date, Tak Fujimoto, though I imagine the almost-painterly Fujimoto would have resisted Rachel Getting Married's Dogmé-influenced shooting style. Out on a weekend-pass from rehab, goth-y, parasitic Kim (Anne Hathaway, mannered and overmatched) returns home to disturb the shit before her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) marries African-American fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) and these long day's journeys into night are no longer viable. Unfortunately, the picture insists on pathologizing all the withering remarks and squirmy frankness via a Tragic Family Secret, making a kneejerk transition in the process from a caustic embarrassment comedy tempered by the director's trademark folksiness to a simply embarrassing melodrama for which a devout humanist like Demme seems overqualified. While I can't deny that Rachel Getting Married has some lovely grace notes in its plodding second half, it definitively jumps the shark with a wedding sequence (surely the most protracted since The Deer Hunter's) in which the film regains its comic footing in the worst way: because it's like a MAD MAGAZINE parody of a Jonathan Demme ceremony, complete with Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock performing, the groom inexplicably serenading his bride with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," and Roger Corman in attendance. Sometimes it sucks to be an auteurist, but what can you do? PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

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That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my mind, the Dardennes crossed the threshold of self-parody with the psychotically-overrated L'Enfant and needed to acknowledge that they'd become predictable.) The picture opens on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi, bearing a striking if irrelevant resemblance to the Ellen Page of Hard Candy, right down to the costume), an Albanian immigrant residing in Belgium's economically depressed Liège (a.k.a. Dardennes Central) who's evidently reached the end of her tether with junkie husband Claudy (L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier, in a lovely performance). (We don't have to live with him, of course, but he generates a tremendous amount of sympathy when she slams the door in his face after he sweetly asks her to play cards.) Slowly, as though the narrative itself were irising out, Claudy is revealed to be the pawn in a green card scheme, the necessary evil before Lorna can enter into an equally sham marriage with a Russian mobster. But if The Apartment taught us anything, nothing brings ersatz couples together like convalescence: during Claudy's latest detox, he and Lorna start acting more like a real husband and wife. And then comes the jarringest bifurcation this side of Full Metal Jacket; Lorna's Silence is two different movies, really, and it's the picture's second, less conventionally satisfying half which has courted the most hostility from critics, despite the fact that it arguably justifies more than any of their previous films all the ink spilled over the years comparing the Dardennes to Robert Bresson. (Maybe it's a challenge to those who insist on making the link.) Tempting to trot out that hoary description "fairlytale for grownups," but let's just say that Lorna's Silence is on top of everything else a clever and affecting pro-choice fable. Minor Dardenne is my kind of Dardenne, I guess. PROGRAMME: Masters

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Her ringtone is a wolf whistle, her bedroom is decorated with Princess Di memorabilia, and she says things like "I feel orange." She's The Girl from Monaco. She's also a coarse variation on Sarah Jessica Parker's SanDeE* from L.A. Story (this time, it's she who does the weather), duking it out for the soul of lawyer Bertrand against his emotionally-involved bodyguard, Christophe. Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) is in Monaco representing a suspected murderess (Stéphane Audran) in a case high-profile enough that the accused's wealthy son assigns Bertrand round-the-clock protection in the form of gentle giant Christophe (Roschdy Zem). But the biggest threat to lonely bachelor Bertrand, a doormat when it comes to the opposite sex, is Bertrand himself. Consequently, Christophe becomes his girl wrangler, going so far as to send one would-be stalker into a come coma on Bertrand's behalf. Thing is, Audrey (Louise Bourgoin) has already been there/done that with Christophe; a succubus built like a porn star, Audrey is the kind of problem you can only solve with a serpentine stretch of highway, Grace Kelly-style. (If you think I'm being tasteless, you should see the movie.) I feel like I'm missing out on some in-joke based on the fact that Bourgoin is a real-life weather girl, but her performance seems bravely-uninhibited for one that's implicitly self-referential. She sure does make an impression in any event for the McGuffin of a formulaic buddy comedy. Between this Anne Fontaine joint and Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend (another agreeable time-waster), it would appear that French filmmakers have just discovered said sub-genre, but they're not doing much to subvert it or innovate it as their CAHIERS DU CINEMA peers/precursors would have done. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

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The title translates as Behind Me, which is sort of where I want to put this Lukas Moodysson-esque downer. I hasten to add, though, that this is a work of fierce emotional intelligence, and I honestly can't decide whether its profoundly upsetting closing minutes (however bullshit they might be) are an example of the characters letting us down or the filmmakers letting the characters down, cynically betraying them and the scenario for shock value. What's interesting is that the logline sent out to the press for Derrière moi obliquely gives away the ending whilst framing the entire film in the context of it--but I hadn't read this synop beforehand and do wonder whether being more aware of the contours of a plot would've made the coda more palatable or simply killed my patience for the movie's slow burn. In Derrière moi, Léa (Charlotte Legault), a comely 14-year-old girl staying with her grandmother in some French-Canadian backwater, catches the predatory eye of Betty (Carina Caputo), a twentysomething drifter too exotic, worldly, and dominant a personality for the sheltered only-child Léa to resist. The set-up is nothing if not psychologically acute, and the constant undercurrent of remorse in Legault's performance rings truer than, say, Evan Rachel Wood's total and instantaneous divorce from her conscience in Thirteen. And it's unfortunate that Betty's hidden agenda subverts Caputo's rich characterization of a woman whose sophistication act is so pathetic that it takes someone much younger not to see through it; Betty's desperation is rendered all too circumstantial by that final turn of the screw. PROGRAMME: Vanguard

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A Gallic collision of The Family Stone (ugh) and The Royal Tenenbaums (woo) with probable roots in Bergman, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) unfurls over Christmas in bourgeois Roubaix, where the dysfunctional Vuillards have congregated to weigh their options now that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with cancer. She needs a bone marrow transplant, and the only potential matches are black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and Henri's suicidal nephew Paul (Emile Berling), whose mother, Henri's sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, in a performance too smirkily opaque for its own good), had previously banished Henri from their lives due to the boundless contempt she's nursed for him since childhood. Backstories for the other members of the clan--curiously sharing their last name with the protagonists of Desplechin's previous film, the similarly dense Kings and Queen, thus facilitating the obvious comparisons to Salinger's Glass Family--and various satellite characters are gradually weaved into this narrative throughline (it's perhaps more accurate to say they're sewn into it like patches on a crazy quilt), eventually revealing a prismatic view of the season in which any yuletide survivor should be able to find her sweet spot. The pall of mortality hanging over the festivities created a frisson of recognition for me, as did an almost antidotal moment where an airing of The Ten Commandments briefly narcotizes everyone in the room, though that's neither here nor there. Indeed, the movie is more broadly appealing and consistently engaging than all that: Desplechin's familiar but no less maddeningly discordant mix of storytelling devices and cinematic techniques is finally anchored by the demands of the homecoming genre and the sentiments of the holiday itself. (Those sentiments, however, may apply more to Festivus than to Christmas, with the disease known as Graft-Versus-Host serving as a mordant metaphor for the inevitable yet inorganic reversal of the parent/child dynamic.) In that sense, it's not quite the galvanizing high-wire act that was Kings and Queen, but it is a gift that keeps on giving. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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