Wendy and Lucy/Two Lovers/Entre les murs (The Class)

Breaking with tradition I'm going to take three new movies at once here purely because I have a back-log and I'm going to the cinema again in a little over an hour. If I'm bored enough I'll re-edit this later to separate them but I can't be bothered and don't have the time to do three separate posts right now.

Wendy and Lucy

Michelle Williams has one of the more interesting careers going of actresses under 30, transitioning from tv performer to decorated film actress through a conveyerbelt of indie films. She's worked with name directors (Wim Wenders, Todd Haynes, Lukas Moodysson and Ang Lee), famous new directors (Ethan Hawke and Charlie Kaufman) and on uber-obscure projects resulting in one of the most laudable and intriguing anti-commercial careers since Kate Winslet post-Titanic

Her latest film to be released here is Wendy and Lucy which is a very simple story about a young drifter named Wendy (Williams) heading up to Alaska to find work. She sleeps in her car and has her dog Lucy for company. Not too long into the film a set of circumstances arises where Wendy loses Lucy and the film follows her attempts to find her despite her car having broken down.

Williams received a lot of praise online for this performance and even though it is a tiny indie film the production company did try to get her an oscar nomination (they sent dvds out to the acting branch of AMPAS). In a way I can see why, but given the reputation of the performance it's a little underwhelming. It's a very restrained performance, which is good, and there are a couple of emotional scenes she does very well indeed. Most of the time though she isn't given the opportunity to really do much and that is down to the nature of the film.

Every aspect of the story is given as much room to breathe as possible but what that results in is a rather ponderous, sparse film without much characterisation. There are some nice little turns from the supporting cast and Williams' anchor of a performance means it's fairly watchable but it's not a very satisfying film and amazingly, even though the runtime is a paltry 80 minutes if anything it drags a touch and is overlong. This would have been a really good 30-40 minute short, but they drag it out and pad it out and dwell on everything, by the time the end arises it's questionable whether it was all really worth it for that. So just about worth it for Williams, but only just and if there was a film from 2008 to see just for her performance then it would be Incendiary, not this one.

Two Lovers

Two Lovers premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and received a fairly good reception. At the beginning we see Leonard (played by Joaquin Phoenix) deliberately jump off a pier into the bay, walking off sharply after being rescued. Attention seeking? A cry for help? A genuine attempt on his life? Writer/Director James Gray isn't interested in such things and it's a shame because the lack of details between characters, the fleshing out of their motivations and relationships is the only major thing that prevents this film being a truly great one.

Leonard lives with his parents, fighting a dual-edged battle against an overbearing mother and an overbearing past. He works for his father's local dry-cleaning business, which a local businessman wants to buy. Upon the two families coming together for a friendly dinner it turns out the attractive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) saw Leonard at work and took a liking to him, engineering the meal as a pretext for a meeting. Soon afterwards Leonard meets new neighbour Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) who lives opposite him. What then plays out is a drama about Leonard yearning for Michelle, who is not interested romantically, but finding himself falling into a relationship with Sandra, who absolutely is interested.

The acting is the first thing that really elevates this film, Phoenix is very fine as the mumbling, weird loner and he portrays Leonard's desire for Michelle extremely believably. Paltrow's Michelle is a depressed mess and if there's one character-trait Paltrow can play in her sleep then it's depression, she's excellent. Shaw has the most sketchy character in Sandra, but she adds a lot of natural warmth and light to it, giving a very sympathetic turn which adds far more than is there on paper. The ensemble is nice too, Isabella Rossellini is always a welcome sight and she plays the concerned mother well, who pushes too far at times but it is coming from a good place. Elias Koteas only has a couple of scenes but he always registers.

It's rather saddening that this film misses a trick or two because aside from the acting it's very smoothly put together. The cinematography is first rate and the editing so fluid it goes unnoticed. The photography of the film mirrors Leonard's struggle, the colour palette is drained but the old fashioned style of his environment is sumptously captured. It simultaneously shows how beautiful the nostalgia of the past is but also saps all the life out of it, shows what a shell of itself it has become. These are the halls where the ghosts that haunt Leonard reside and he cannot escape them. He is treated like a teenager and accordingly acts like one, the viscious circle repeating like an ouroboros.

In the end the film gets a touch too predictable and given where they take it, had they done simple things like flesh out the character of Sandra and her relationship with Leonard more, or somehow highlighted the parallels that essentially what Leonard is offering Michelle is so similar to what Sandra can give Leonard, then the decisions taken and direction of the piece would have a lot more emotion and meaning. As it is despite the lovely visual style this remains a rather cold, distant film by Gray, which works mainly because it shows Leonard's position in society but does not entirely match up with the relationships with these women or the passions within him. A very good film which flies by and is very engaging but with just a little effort it could have been something very special indeed.

Entre les Murs (The Class)

This film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year and even managed an oscar nomination due to the new set up of their foreign language branch to include films of international acclaim. Usually the rotating juries at Cannes make puzzling choices with divisive films that a lot of the time aren't even good, let alone great, but this is one of their best choices in the last ten years.

We follow Mr. Marin, a young teacher, and his class of 14 and 15 year olds for the school year. The first thing about this film is just how consistently amusing it is. It's shot in a very simple way which is reminiscent of, if not an actual documentary. We are shown the teachers melting down at the frustration of it all, the difficulty in trying to engage the kids without getting sidetracked as well as the problems pupils and teachers face just in seeing each other every day. It doesn't sound very entertaining but seeing one teacher go through another's new class list saying "nice, nice, not nice at all...", the kids arguing about whether Morocco or Mali are better at football or a teacher impersonating the more annoying children it's extremely entertaining.

It also has a lot to say about the education system in France, particularly to do with discipline and how teachers and parents can easily miss the signs of truly disruptive children and how the structures they have in place to deal with this are almost guaranteed to fail the students in the most dire need of help. François Bégaudeau wrote the book this is based on, the screenplay and stars in it too and he is exceptional, his Marin is both charming and frustrated, but the key to his character and the interest in the film is that he's not perfect and he does make incredibly stupid mistakes. This makes for a fascinating exploration of mutual respect and how teacher's actions effect the pupils, particularly the bad ones.

Overall there isn't a focus to the film, there's no central plot, but every aspect of it rings so true it's more of a slice of life and in that respect it's perfectly realised. All the children create distinctive and memorable characters but never look like they're "giving a performance", it's incredibly natural and the bulk of the credit for that must go to director Laurent Cantet for extracting such a genuine group dynamic. This is one of the finest films of 2008 and more than recommended, capturing the truth of school life in the way no documentary could because with a camera in the room the kids would not act this way, like in the disciplinary hearings the film criticises, they'd be more submissive. The key to The Class is that they're not, and this film gets that across superbly.