OLIVER TWIST
**/****
starring Ben Kingsley, Barney Clark, Leanne Rowe, Mark Strong
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Roman Polanski
Rois et reine
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Maurice Garrel
screenplay by Roger Bohbot, Arnaud Desplechin
directed by Arnaud Desplechin
by Walter Chaw Roman Polanski is an architectural director. By that I mean he moves his camera in careful, constructed motions, and the characters he places within these movements are best when they seem restrained by them, oppressed by the presence of the director in a way similar to Hitchcock’s protagonists. Indeed, Polanski at his best (Repulsion, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown) makes films that Hitchcock might have made: alight with social revulsion, weighted by claustrophobic set-pieces, and thick with subtext. But Polanski at his worst (Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, Frantic, Pirates, Tess) betrays a tendency towards the frenetic–an unbecoming manic energy that leans towards the childish instead of what I think is the intended demoniacal. Polanski close to the vest is Polanski at his best, and when midway through something tending towards mediocre like The Pianist, he erected a literal wall within which to restrain his antihero (tellingly, the best Polanski protagonists are acted-upon)–that architectural boundary allowing the director to regain his footing, if only for the last part of the film.
I’d hoped Polanski would carry that spark off the old iron to inflame his follow-up project, the Dickens adaptation Oliver Twist, with a little of the infernal Polanski conflagration. Alas, not before his kingpin Fagin (Ben Kingsley, making his umpteenth application to the bad wig hall of fame) finds himself crushed by the close confines of a prison cell (and by the spectre of his impending execution) do we see a flash of the ugly psychological tension of classic Polanski. Until then, not far from the end, the picture is a brilliant set and impressive costume design, Dickensian London (actually Prague) captured as it is with grimy, grey precision by The Pianist DP Pawel Edelman in much the same way he shot the Warsaw Ghetto. The two are ideologically similar for Polanski, I think, a director whose life might have been “borrowed” by novelist Jerzy Kosinski for his The Painted Bird (about a child alone in Nazi-occupied territories) but who surely sees Oliver Twist‘s hell of sweatshops, cutpurses, and soot-blackened, post-industrial urban disintegration as no less autobiographical. As with The Pianist, though, I begin to wonder if the way Polanski’s life turned out has softened his rage a little, transforming the man who had Catherine Deneuve murder a man with a straight razor and Mia Farrow give birth to the antichrist into a humanist historian with a belief in Rousseau’s social contract. He’s no longer suspicious of the institutions that hem in his passive heroes and drive them mad–he has the faith now (he must) to rely heavily on the kindness of others.
Barney Clark is around the age (eleven) of Oliver Twist (and of Roman Polanski when he was separated from his parents, as it happens) and plays him with the right raffish look, but he lacks a certain fire in the eyes. It’s in keeping with Polanski that simpering, weak-willed vesicles occupy the centres of his films, ready to be stuffed by the dark cruelties of the forces acting upon them and, possibly, mounted in a cosmic trophy case–but an Oliver Twist with a passive Oliver Twist is a gruelling sequence of parcelled-off episodes (as Dickens wrote them), particularly when Kingsley’s Fagin is off the reservation, Harry Eden’s Judas Goat Artful Dodger is given a distracting amount of remorse, and Leanne Rowe’s Nancy and Edward Hardwicke’s Mr. Brownlow are so virtuous they almost emit a holy luminescence. Even archfiend Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) is a malevolence contained. The problem is that Dickens was a better social chronicler than storyteller, and Polanski has chosen to adopt that weakness in the interests of utter faithfulness to the text. Wiser to adopt his approach to Macbeth–to steep a revered, canonical text in blood and semen, thereby discovering the beasts in the urban jungle that inspired works at their base so harsh and politically charged.
Better yet, in hindsight of course (foresight says that Polanski and Oliver Twist were meant for each other), have audacious French director Arnaud Desplechin take a run at it. Desplechin’s Kings & Queen (Rois et reine) is an exhausting, exhaustive interpersonal melodrama that unreels in the exact, disquieting simulacrum of what would happen were Mike Leigh’s naturalistic instinct shot through with Quentin Tarantino’s method-mad, pastiche cinephilia. The characters are stock, their situations the stuff of pabulum, but in Desplechin’s hands, they ring with the formalist, almost-stodgy scholarship–stitched at the hip with verve and the joy of filmmaking–of the French New Wave. He’s France’s Stephen Chow: a man entirely of his own culture who has begun to assimilate all of popular American film culture into his vision. This makes sense of the recurring theme in Kings & Queen of a print of “Leda and the Swan”, a story of the rape of Leda by Zeus in bestial form (the offspring of said union, Helen of Troy)–the import of which the idea that, as Yeats phrased it: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Substitute Desplechin for Leda and American movies for the swan and you have the director’s auto-analysis: he’s empowered by the association, and the offspring of the union between Yankee vacuity and his French sensibility is Kings & Queen.
Nora’s (Emmanuelle Devos) theme song is “Moon River”–a tune composed for a tone-deaf Audrey Hepburn to strum in her role as a hooker falling in love with a hooker in Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s–and it plays under her as the film opens and closes. Nora’s an art dealer who buys a print of “Leda and the Swan” for her novelist father’s birthday, discovering on that blessed day that her father is riddled with terminal cancer and not expected to live more than five, maybe ten days. It forces single-parent Nora (widowed at a young age, though we discover that she actually married the cadaver of her lover so that her son could take his name) to confront her wayward sister and her responsibility to her boy–and it ultimately greases her decision to get back in contact with long-lost lover Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric), a violinist in a quartet mistakenly (sort of) committed to a mental hospital, so that deeply-unbalanced Ismaël might serve as the father figure for her kid now that dad’s in God’s waiting room. Poised for the little victories and pat, violin-swollen resolutions of serious contenders for Oscar’s foreign prize, Desplechin opts instead for a dazzling collection of artful dream sequences, archival footage-enhanced flashbacks, and enough narrative two-stepping to confuse Guy Ritchie–except that Desplechin’s vision coheres into a cogent portrait of the ways that the human mind inputs data, as well as the futility with which language tends to greet the enormity of expressing emotion.
An early complaint against Desplechin was that he tended to tell instead of show. It’s a charge he began to address in the maddening but brilliant Playing “In the Company of Men” (which never found a distributor in the United States) and finally succeeds in exorcising in Kings & Queen. It’s not that it’s without its occasional passages of wordiness, but that the dialogue is an astonishing mélange of non-sequiturs–confessionals and therapy sessions and drug trips and unreliable narrations of murders and betrayals more sundry. (The images match the script’s jumpiness, hiccup-for-hiccup.) The trick, though, isn’t in its technical acrobatics, but in the tightrope it walks between incomprehensibility and absolute sterling clarity. Kings & Queen is great filmmaking and, as does not always follow, a great film. Desplechin’s familiar characters and situations are subverted each in their turn: opportunities for heroism undermined by tragically imperfect heroes; situations ripe for cathartic purging held in permanent tension; and moments every step along the way where everything that’s come before is cast into suspicion. (Consider the familiar/madly unfamiliar moment Ismaël is confronted at his apartment by a pair of white coats, and, later, Ismaël’s conversation with Nora in a field of grain that isn’t bucolic so much as twisted and, in its quiet way, monstrous.) Under it all is joy: joy in the making, joy in the watching, and joy in the discussion after. An important film, with the kicker that the moments where it strains a little under the tension of its headlong flight indicate that Desplechin, for as reckless and courageous as he seems (the film analogy is Col. Kilgore on the beach), has room still to improve.
