The Idol
**½/****
starring Leelee Sobieski, James Hong, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Jalil Lespert
screenplay by Gérard Brach, Samantha Lang, based on the novel À l'heure dite by Michelle Tourneur
directed by Samantha Lang
by Bill Chambers I'm largely indifferent to L' Idole, a Gallic production directed by an Australian and co-starring two Americans of different ethnicities who admirably perform their parts in French. Leelee Sobieski's task is made more difficult by the role's requirement of her to deliver foreign-language dialogue in a tertiary accent, as the native New Yorker plays an Australian touring France with a theatre company. (I'm not enough of a linguist to gauge her success at it.) Sarah Silver (Sobieski) moves into a Paris co-op and befriends next-door neighbour and former cook Mr. Zao (James Hong), an elderly gentleman who comes out of retirement, so to speak, to wait on Sarah hand and foot. Co-written, pointedly, by frequent Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach, L' Idole thus bears a passing resemblance to the Sobieski starrer My First Mister but replaces Hollywood bullshit with European humbug–the last half-hour is full of stock ambiguities and the filmmakers mistaking Sarah's coquettishness for depth of character. (And, it must be said, the moment in which Sarah tells Mr. Zao that they will never make love drains the movie of its compelling sexual tension, however questionable.) Save a Storytelling-esque subplot involving a duplicitous little girl, the picture draws its power from the worldly Hong, perhaps best known on these shores as the centuries-old villain from Big Trouble in Little China; Hong overcomes L' Idole's tendency to dismiss Chinese courtliness out of hand–cavalier treatment of Mr. Zao by every other character, in other words–with a defiant dignity. I just hope it's not his swan song, because going out as the sage equivalent to Ghost World's Seymour is no kind of curtain for this screen legend. PROGRAM: Contemporary World Cinema
