Okay, three to blast through but before I do I just found out that the BBC is showing the remaining 11 episodes of the first series of the Swedish Wallanders I was talking about the other day. They showed two to accompany the Kenneth Branagh ones last year but they're showing all the others on Monday nights on BBCFour. Cracking stuff, especially having just had my interest raised with seeing the first couple from the second series online.

Anyway, on with it, a rather curious aspect of this blog is that I can see the most popular "keywords", and aside from some very funny ones like "movies with threesomes" getting a lot of hits (thank you Truffaut ), for some reason there are always a ridiculous amount on Mary-Louise Parker. I must be being linked somehow, I guess I do talk about her a lot as I watch a fair bit of stuff with her in. One such thing I saw recently was Vinegar Hill, which is a US TV movie I stumbled across last week. The basic set up is that Mary-Louise and her family move in with her husband's parents following the husband losing his job. So what's there is the coming apart of their relationship coupled with the unearthing of "secrets" surrounding Parker's overbearing father in law Tom Skerritt. Parker's the reason to see it, she's her usual ridiculously natural self, where they take the story isn't particularly moving or revelatory, but it's a decent watch.

A few months ago I was bemoaning the fact that aside from The Last Metro, none of Catherine Deneuve's films from the 80s are available here. Having stumbled across a site with a new Isabelle Huppert film available I decided to have a root around for some of her 80s stuff online and was able to download Story of Women, which won her best actress at the Venice Film Festival. It's basically the same as Vera Drake, but if Vera Drake were a heinously unrepentant cow who whored out women as well as being the local abortionist .

Isabelle Huppert

The biggest problem with this film (which I cannot believe is directed by Claude Chabrol, having none of his patented mood or atmosphere) is the characterisation. While it is fine to have a completely unsympathetic character (think Raging Bull), in order to make it work dramatically that character has even more of a burden to be fascinating to compensate for the dislikability and here aside from what she actually does, they don't delve into Huppert's character at all. They make her a moral bankrupt, and as while that isn't a problem as Capote showed us, if that moral bankruptcy is just matter of fact and doesn't reflect back on the character then it's shallow. Here Huppert is unrepentant and merely whines about the situation she finds herself in, which offers no insight or pathos. While based on a true story, it's hard to grasp the point they're making, if it's that nobody should suffer this fate regardless of whether they're "nice" (like Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake) or not, it also seems to say she should be given a pass because she's a woman. The rights and wrongs of the real life situation are not satisfactorily examined, and a game turn from Huppert can't fill in the blanks that aren't there on paper and make this film (or even her character) vital.

So from one acclaimed performance to an even more acclaimed one, namely William Hurt's Oscar/BAFTA/Cannes-winning effort in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hurt has the showier role than Raul Julia, playing the effeminate homosexual sharing a jail cell with Julia's rugged political prisoner, but if anything I preferred Raul. Hurt is overtly camp, necessarily so, but never really disappears behind his mannerisms and delivers the character (the way, say Philip Seymour Hoffman did in Flawless). It's always William Hurt giving a performance, and that performance is good but it's very superficial. Julia on the other hand is far more natural and broods nicely. It's just a shame that two fine turns create very little chemistry and as such, coupled with the writing, I found the development of their relationship as presented rather unconvincing.

This film has had a seemingly strange fate, in that despite having lots of awards to "sell" it, it is only available here on import dvd, and was even unavailable in America for years. I don't think that lack of distribution was much of a loss, the direction from Hector Babenco is unfocused, the story uneven and the motivation of the characters unbalances the drama and weakens it. Just about worth seeing for the individual performances, but certainly a film which fails to blend them together and is rather poor in quality and turgid.