OPPOSING VOICES
One of the highlights of the 1995 Toronto Film
Festival, Georgia tells the story of two sisters--one sings, the
other tries to--locked in a love-hate symbiosis of unacknowledged rivalry
that threatens to destroy at least one of them. Directed by Ulu Grosbard
(Straight Time, True Confessions) with the lingering attention to
emotional detail of a good psychological novel, the movie stars Mare
Winningham as a happily married Seattle folk-rock singer whose honeyed
voice and stable temperament have brought her the mainstream success that
eludes her younger sister. A desperate scrap of a thing with raccoon eyes,
a roaring drug habit, and a Joplin rasp that barely keeps her employed at
the low end of the punk-rock club scene, Sadie (hauntingly played by the
endlessly versatile Jennifer Jason Leigh) shuttles between generosity and
resentment, between trying to be her sister and holding fast to her
own wild-card, inventive style. In the waves of love, pain, and rage that
surge between the two sisters, it becomes clear that the Georgia of the
movie's title is less the older sister herself than an idea of her, swollen
into obsession, that casts a giant shadow over Sadie's life. The film is
thrilling in its ambition, poised and tactful in its execution (we come to
know the characters not merely through what they say but through how they
act when least self-aware), and almost unbearably moving in the
performances of Leigh and Winningham, both of whom sing their own vocals.
John Doe and Max Perlich also shine as Sadie's former lover and
straight-arrow husband respectively.
Leigh burning the candle at both ends
Photo: Joyce Rudolph
TALES OF TWO CITIES
Asian films play havoc with our clock-regulated sense of time. Although Chinese
director Zhang Yimou's newest work, Shanghai Triad (set in 1930s Shanghai
gangland), is positively speedy compared with such earlier films as Raise the
Red Lantern and Ju Dou, the picture is every bit as gorgeous--and as
schematic--as anything else Zhang has done. A peasant boy (Wang Xiao Xiao) is
brought to Shanghai to watch over the spoiled mistress (Gong Li, as stunning as
ever but overdoing the scheming-hussy bit) of the city's prostitution and
opium-trade Godfather (Li Baotian), and becomes embroiled in the mobsters'
deadly schemes. When a plot forces the entourage to retreat to the country, the
kept woman discovers too late the better self she left behind in her rural
childhood. Zhang's humanistic decency is born of the savagery wrought later on
rural China during the Cultural Revolution. But his opposition of noble
village and fleshpot city is idealized, and as frozen in time as the
stylized landscape he paints.
Time appears to speed up in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's superlative
Chungking Express. But though the movie is shot with a frantic hand-held camera
among the flophouses that make up Hong Kong's tourist area, it's also a
meditative saunter through modern romance. Set around a fast-food joint, the
movie tells two stories of soulful young cops who, dumped by their
girlfriends, mope around fetishizing the household objects that remind them of
their lost loves, barely noticing the possibilities (Faye Wang is especially
delightful) around them. Sweet, funny, and wildly intelligent, Chungking
Express makes a perfect first release for Quentin Tarantino's new distribution
label within Miramax Films.
SINGLE WHITE PRESIDENT SEEKING...
Like the popular Dave, but with none of that film's charm and verve, Rob
Reiner's new movie caters--panders--to a powerful American wish for a President
who really means to control handguns and save forests. More a series of
speaking engagements than a movie, The American President has some sharp if
unoriginal things to say about the political process. But the more momentous
question it poses is, Can the President date? The answer is no, no, no, yes.
Conveniently widowed, the folksy Andy (Michael Douglas) gets into hot water
with his Gramm-ish rival (Richard Dreyfuss) and his own handlers (Michael J.
Fox is good in the Stephanopoulos role), ably abetted by the media, when he
starts dating feisty environmental lobbyist Sydney Wade (Annette Bening).
Visually the film is deadly dull, but its worst problem is central miscasting.
Bening, who works best as a forties vamp (Bugsy) or a sexy minx (The Grifters),
is wasted in a role that calls for her to do little more than the old
blush-and-dimple, while Douglas, who'd be excellent as a realistic
President, is plain unbelievable as a nice chap. I kept waiting for him to show
his rotten side.
For Bening and Douglas, dating isn't easy
Photos: François Duhamel
Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly.
