HOME SWEET HOME
The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are not an acquired
taste. You either like them or you don't, because however much their subject
matter varies, from Blood Simple (1985) to the disastrous
The Hudsucker Proxy
(1994), the song remains the same--a rancid, brutally comic affront to good
taste and good will. It's a chilly life with the Coens, and nowhere more so
than in their latest film, which is also their funniest and cruelest in years.
Fargo takes an ice pick to the Coens' home state of Minnesota, turning a
fact-based story into a black comedy that pokes fun simultaneously at the
heartland and at the conventions of the true-crime genre. (Errol Morris's The
Thin Blue Line seems a prime target.) William H. Macy stars as a grubby Twin
Cities car dealer whose latest ham-fisted attempt at making a fast buck is
to hire a couple of hit men (Steve Buscemi, wearing frightening teeth, and Peter
Stormare) from Fargo, North Dakota, to kidnap his wife and then extort a ransom
from her father. When everything goes wrong and several locals die in the hick
town of Brainerd, the phlegmatic and highly pregnant sheriff (Frances
McDormand, in a hilariously laconic performance) is brought in to investigate.
Fargo is the deadpan gorefest we have come to expect from the Coens, but the
movie's rather overworked joke is midwestern blandness. By the end of the movie
you'd rather see any number of severed limbs than endure another "ya betcha" or
"okey, dokey, thanks a bunch." How will it play in Peoria? Probably not at all.
Macy trying to hide the evidence
Photo: Michael Tackett
A LOVE TRIANGLE FOR THE NINETIES
Nothing can be finer than a French sex farce when it's
done right. Actress
Josiane Balasko (Grosse Fatigue) makes a perky contribution to the
tradition
with French Twist, a très nineties romp, set in a French provincial
town, about a reluctant ménage à trois with increasingly fluid
sexual preferences. Loli (Victoria Abril) is a dancer who gave up her career to
raise a family with her husband, Laurent (Alain Chabat), a self-satisfied
realtor who has kept his many infidelities from his trusting wife. Their
marriage is an applecart waiting to be upset. Enter, right on cue, Marijo
(Balasko), a cheerful butch-lesbian disc jockey who charms her way into Loli's
bed and enrages the homophobic Laurent. When Laurent's dim-bulb friend (Ticky
Holgado) spills the beans to Loli about her husband's philandering, she seizes
the advantage and queens it over both Laurent and Marijo, sharing her favors
with both and enjoying their jealousy, until she is in turn outmaneuvered by a
shift in the balance of power. As broad as it is slight and unstinting with the
slapstick, French Twist races from one wave of mayhem to the next. The movie is
saved from its occasional dips into gooey sentimentalism by peppy dialogue,
written by
Balasko, and by the sprightly ensemble acting, lifted into greatness by the
incomparably radiant Abril, the Spanish diva of many a Pedro Almodovar
film.
Balasko, Abril, and Chabat (left to right)
Photo: Courtesy of Miramax Films
A LITTLE GIRL'S BIG ADVENTURE
Iranian director Jafar Panahi's first feature,
The White Balloon, which won the
Camera d'Or and co-won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes last year,
tells of an awfully big adventure in an awfully small world. In the hours
before Tehran's New Year, a seven-year-old girl named Razieh (played with
astonishing poise by Aida Mohammadkhani) sets out to buy a goldfish for the
festivities, armed with her mother's housekeeping money and dire warnings not
to dally. Adult advice is made to be ignored: losing her precious stash, first
to a wily snake-charmer, then to a gutter near a tailor's shop, Razieh
encounters indifference, cantankerousness, and the kindness of strangers--a
whole world contained within a few streets. Scripted by veteran director Abbas
Kiarostami (who directed the exquisite 1994 film Through the Olive Trees) and
shot in real time from the perspective of the fiercely single-minded child, The
White Balloon is not a film for the plot-hungry. This beautiful movie is a
funny, touching, and intelligent celebration of the process of looking and the
assertion of an adventurous spirit over prudence.
A very important goldfish
Photo: Courtesy of October Films
Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly.
