Lone Scherfig’s first foray into
filmmaking, the darkly sweet comedy Italian
for Beginners, was one of the most enjoyable foreign films of this young
century despite being made under the rigid guidelines of the Danish cinema
movement Dogme 95.
The
“Vow of Chastity,” as cooked up by filmmakers Lars von Trier (The Idiots) and Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration — go rent it),
required, among other things, location shooting, handheld camerawork, and color
film, and forbade the use of a score, artificial lighting, and special effects.
Freed
from those constraints, Ms. Scherfig’s latest project, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,
follows up on the promise exhibited in her debut with more dark, more sweet,
and more letters in its title/handy plot synopsis.
Wilbur
North (Jamie Sives) does, in fact, want to kill himself, employing everything
from pills to blades to gas to rivers to cords, but nothing seems to work. “It
gets more and more humiliating every time I survive,” he complains to his
exceedingly patient older brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins).
Harbour
has obviously shouldered the burden that is Wilbur for quite some time. When
Wilbur gets tossed from his apartment building for endangering the other
tenants (via the gas stove), he goes to live with Harbour in the little flat
attached to the quaint Glasgow bookshop bequeathed to them by their recently
deceased father.
A
whirlwind romance between Harbour and a quiet single mother named Alice
(Shirley Henderson) leads to a Chinese restaurant wedding at which Alice’s
friend too accurately pegs Wilbur as “drop-dead gorgeous.” Thus begins Wilbur’s
entanglements with the opposite sex, including a brief fling with Moira (Julia
Davis), the increasingly bizarrely coiffed head nurse at his group therapy, as
well as an unignorable attraction to his new sister-in-law.
Using
beautifully lit interiors shot in the filmmaker’s native Denmark and exteriors
that somehow conned me into checking the airfares to gloomy Glasgow, Ms.
Scherfig is able to convey both the feeling of an increasingly cozy family life
and the despair of solitude, real or imagined. She’s aided by lush cello music
that never seemed maudlin or morose, despite the happenings on the screen.
The
ever-reliable Shirley Henderson, a Michael Winterbottom regular seen in a
number of UK films running the gamut from Trainspotting to Topsy-Turvy, creates a sympathetic
character out of one who makes choices the audience may consider questionable.
Adrian
Rawlins — probably best known as Harry Potter’s dad — puts the “art” in
“martyr” as the saintly Harbour. Jamie Sives as Wilbur makes the most of his
feature-film debut, looking like and coming across as the result of a union
between Jeremy Irons and Colin Farrell.
It
was tough to empathize at times with Wilbur’s petulant behavior and a
depression that is never clearly explained. Perhaps, like the lemmings that
catch Wilbur’s eye on a trip to the museum, he does what he does and we don’t
have to understand why. It’s a slight quibble, and really the only one I have
with what is otherwise a clever, touching script.
It’s
understandably difficult to make a film rooted in a person’s desire to end his
own life funny, identifiable, or even watchable. But if you’ve ever seen a film
before, you know that this film isn’t really about suicide.
Like
most films, it’s ultimately about love — the absence of love, the need for
love, and what exactly to do about love when it finally shows up.
— Dayna Papaleo
A stoic schlub of a pizza delivery guy motors through
Tehran, slowly absorbing the indignities of class distinctions, in Crimson
Gold. It’s a sort of Iranian High
and Low, the Akira Kurosawa film about how the upper and lower classes are
conjoined in the moments of crime that the chasm between them spurs.
The film
does not exactly make an appeal for Hussein, the morally indifferent
protagonist of the film, or excuse the crime he comes to commit, but some point
about class does seem to be the motivation.
It almost
appears to be a response to criticism that Jafar Panahi’s earlier film The Circle (also scripted by fellow
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami) gave the impression
that only women encounter repression in Iran. Crimson Gold widens the net, while employing a very similar style,
so that the two almost seem companion pieces.
Both
contain a flair for recurring visual motifs, and the portals in The Circle that signaled restrictions
for women of a closed-off society find a home here in the little portal Hussein
stares blankly through on his motorbike windshield.
European
pacing and a straightforward, documentary frankness belie the film’s ridiculous
tagline: “When you’re pushed too far, you might just push back.” Hussein isn’t
pushed, and he doesn’t push back so much as act out, taking out his
long-fomenting frustrations on a jeweler with casual prejudices.
This
moment bookends the film, and encapsulates the poetic simplicity that is Crimson Gold‘s main strength. The
robbery proceeds before a static shot looking out the store’s door, the doorway
flanked by darkness, so that it presents another portal. The scene is so
engrossing and visually haunting that you scarcely notice as the camera slowly
draws forward until the doorframe disappears and you find yourself in the
Orwellian world of modern-day Iran.
Crimson Gold screens on Friday, April
30, at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue, at 8 p.m.
Tix: $6. 271-3361, www.eastman.org.
— Andy Davis
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2004.
