Naomi and Greta, 73 years apart, equally wonderful...

Well, a few nights ago I saw The Painted Veil. Not the Greta Garbo 1934 version, I doubt I'll be able to find that anywhere, but the Naomi Watts/Ed Norton version from last year. The basic plot set up is Naomi and Ed enter into a loveless marriage and following Naomi's inevitable infidelity Norton (a bacteriologist in China) in a not-very-thinly-veiled act of revenge volunteers himself and his wife to go inland into the heart of a cholera epidemic to help the villagers combat the disease.

I don't see much need to delve more into the plot, this is a film for the senses. It is gorgeously shot, the music is absolutely sublime, it ebbs and flows and never overpowers but always supplements the images. The star of the show is Watts, she is utterly divine. Her emotions seem almost effortlessly conveyed, she never looks for a second like she is acting, it is a visceral portrayal of this woman's journey and may well be the finest work this actress has done. It's less showy than Mulholland Dr., it's not the oscarbait of 21 Grams, but it takes her finest moments from those films and combines it with the incredible ability she showed in King Kong to go above and beyond what is on the page. Her role is a very good one but she nails this out of the park so quietly and beautifully it is truly a joy to behold.

Overall I liked the film, a nice change of pace for Toby Jones in support, Norton's accent wasn't as bad as it sounded in the trailer, you can sense a little where the story is going and it's a little long, but that's not too much of a problem. It's funnier than I expected with some lovely Somerset Maugham-isms (it's based on his novel), but I think some might not like the relationship explored between the characters and they're not really fleshed out. That's where the acting comes in, Watts imbues her character with such real emotion she makes you care when it's not there on paper and she's good enough to recommend the film.

Coincidentally, the day after seeing Naomi reprise Garbo's 1934 role, I saw Greta's previous film, Queen Christina. All I can say is ... what a classic. Story is Christina becomes Queen of Sweden at a very young age in the middle of a 30 years war. We then cut to Christina in her early 20s when Sweden is on the verge of victory and she is being pressured to marry a national hero. Spain sends an ambassador to ask for Christina's hand in marriage but the ambassador and Christina fall for each other.

Garbo is so good I could be here all night writing and I don't think I'd even begin to scratch the surface of how brilliant she is in this film. It's the best performance from the 1930s I've seen, male or female. Now, while I do not claim to have seen anywhere near the amount of films from that decade to put too much weight behind that statement, I've seen a fair few of the top rated ones and nothing touches Garbo in this film. She does a range of emotions, she seamlessly flits between her role as dominant Queen dealing with issues of state and human lover and everything that goes with that. Her eyes, so effortlessly and completely expressive convey the soul of her character in a way that just cannot be taught or replicated.

This film is everything Elizabeth : The Golden Age should have been. It's fun, it's unpretentious, it doesn't bask in its own merits, it throws historical accuracy to the wind but does so in favour of telling you a romanticised possibility. The techs are exceptional for the time, the supporting players all good, the script jam packed with cracking lines and it rattles along at a pace. Yet it is the moments when the film rests that make it so sublime. The scene recalled by Bertolucci in The Dreamers where Garbo takes a couple of minutes to take in the surroundings in her moment of bliss, uttering "I have been memoriiiizing this roooooom - in the fuuuuture, in my memoryyyy, I shall live a great deeeeal in this rooooom", is just magical.

While it does get a tad predictable this film is just a bona fide classic. A performance for the ages, a film that should never be forgotten even though the oscars completely passed it over. Sadly I cannot say the same for one the oscars did go for, namely Cousin, Cousine. It was a lamentably weak year in the middle of the wasteland of a decade that was the 1970s (when the leads of Carrie and Rocky get nominated, you know it's an appalling year) and AMPAS must have been desperate - Barrault didn't even get awards attention in *France* for the role.

It's a comedy about two couples. One of the wives dances with one of the husbands at the wedding of a mutual cousin by marriage while their spouses are off somewhere having sex. Despite it going no further than that and the errant husband ending *all* of his affairs in an attack of guilt, the wife strikes up a friendship with the cuckolded husband she danced with to the chagrin of both guilty partners. It's amusing, but it's not exactly intelligent or witty. Even being just over an hour and a half it feels overlong and padded out and slow in places and none of the characters are drawn well enough to fully engage the audience. It's alright, but nothing special.

The same can very much be said for the delightfully titled Curiosity Kills The Cat. I got this free from yesasia.com for buying 3 chinese dvds off them and I selected it because I knew Carina Lau had received attention for it in Hong Kong. This is the sort of thing they should be submitting for the oscars rather than dreck like The Banquet or an endless succession of action films which stand no chance of a nomination (even if the remakes eventually win Best Picture despite not being as good as the original ... ).

Not to say it's so good it should be submitted, it's just something different that they'd be more likely to go for. Lau is good, but this fragmented tale which peels back on itself giving different aspects of the same situation from differing viewpoints doesn't exactly work. The basic premise is a man is cheating on Carina Lau with the local hairdresser and we find he is being stalked with red paint posing as blood being found on cars, chucked on his wife, etc.

If that sounds even mildly interesting I've probably been too kind to it. It's a very average film, totally run of the mill and Carina is a nicely done beacon of class in the proceedings but the script isn't as clever or compelling as it could or should be and there's no reason to go out of your way to find this, even though it's not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

I stayed up to watch Hantuchova last night but it got rained off (how is it raining in Australia ... in summer?) - to my delight/dismay the two seeds above her in her quarter both dropped out and while I should be happy, Danka never does well when it's easy and on seeding she is "expected" to now get to the semifinals. She has her delayed third round match tonight and if she wins that she gets Maria Kirilenko, who she lost to the last time she played. She also has a doubles match - I bought the Eurosport player for the week and it logs all the matches so I can watch anything from the main 6 courts whenever I want, for 2.90 Euros that's insane so I'm loving it. Dani's up first and the only way I could have seen her is via this player so I'm so glad I signed up. ONE MATCH AT A TIME, DANKA! GO SLOVAKIA!!!