Let’s get lost
Movies
What do you want to get out of your movie-watching? Laughs?
Thrills? Hopefully some truth? Me, I long to be destroyed. While I’m a fool for
well-written romantic anguish, any manufactured tragedy or fictional woe can
have its way with me. Unfortunately, the traditional pre-holiday drought of
affecting films has left me totally cold, but I crossed my fingers that new
pieces by a couple of contemporary cinema’s most accomplished filmmakers would
drain my tear ducts.
Andrรฉ Tรฉchinรฉ’s Changing Times features two Gallic
legends — Catherine Deneuve and Gรฉrard Depardieu — in a layered look at
relationships between French and Moroccans in modern-day Tangiers. Depardieu
plays Antoine, a construction site manager who has finagled assignment to Morocco for the
express purpose of wooing Cรฉcile (Deneuve), an old flame he hasn’t seen in more
than 30 years. Now a radio host married to a philandering doctor, Cรฉcile is
also contending with the return of her lawyer son Sami and his addict
girlfriend Nadia, whom he abandons to tryst with Bilal, his working-class
Moroccan lover.
Depardieu and Deneuve are of course splendid, him a weary
hulk of a man made bold by love (or at least delusions of it), her a faded
beauty trying to resist the chance to recapture lost youth. While Antoine
resorts to North African voodoo in an effort to win back Cecile, Tรฉchinรฉ also
examines the colonial culture clash via the interactions between Cecile and her
Moroccan husband, Bilal and Sami (himself half Moroccan/half French), and, in
the most compelling subplot, Nadia and her devout Muslim twin.
Though well into his fourth decade of filmmaking, Tรฉchinรฉ
has only been getting stateside release since his breakthrough film, 1994’s Wild Reeds. In the intervening decade
he’s been an arthouse staple, with movies like Les Voleurs and Ma Saison
Prรฉfรฉrรฉe showcasing his urgent handheld style and his unwillingness to
simplify the complicated. At the end of Changing
Times, however, the wheels seemed to fall off, as Tรฉchinรฉ resorted to sudsy
plot contrivances and ultra-tidy wrap-ups, all salient points about race and
creed nearly lost to an unnecessarily fairy-tale ending.
Zhang Yimou is one of China’s better-known filmmakers,
debuting in 1987 with Red Sorghum and, with movies like 1991’s sublime Raise
the Red Lantern all the way through 2004’s bombastic House of Flying Daggers, maintaining a level of quality and success
matched by very few peers. Zhang’s latest film is Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, a lovely meditation on
fathers, sons, and the importance of communication, even if people speak
different tongues.
When a reticent Japanese fisherman named Takata (veteran
Japanese actor Ken Takakura) learns his long-estranged son has cancer, he
embarks on a trip to China
to film a performance of one of his son’s beloved Chinese folk operas in hopes
of reconciliation. Cue red tape, language barriers, and another fractured
father-son relationship, and Takata finds his trip has become a journey, his
original focus shifting as he decides to locate the young boy of the despondent
opera singer he believes to be so vital to his film.
There’s nothing subtle about the growing bond between Takata
and 8-year-old Yang Yang, and a more jaded person (i.e., not me) might resent
any heavy-handedness involving a gruff curmudgeon and a cute kid. Luckily,
Takakura’s unsentimental performance and Yimou’s elegant imagery elevate Riding Alone above garden-variety
melodrama, resulting in a movingly satisfying film.
Zhang takes these slice-of-life breaks after spells making
intricate period drama; following 1994’s To
Live and 1995’s Shanghai Triad he
finished out the ’90s with the realism of The
Road Home and Not One Less. In a
matter of weeks, however, another of his costumed epics, Curse of the Golden Flower, hits American screens, reuniting Zhang
with Gong Li (their celebrated romantic and professional partnership ended on Shanghai Triad) and reacquainting
American audiences with the awesome Chow Yun-Fat. Zhang’s first martial arts
extravaganza, the devastating (and devastatingly beautiful) Hero, left me in tatters for much of
2004. But this is nothing new.
Changing Times (NR), directed by Andrรฉ Tรฉchinรฉ, shows Friday,
November 24, 8 p.m., and Saturday, November 25, 5 p.m., at the George Eastman
House’s Dryden Theatre | Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (NR),
directed by Zhang Yimou, opens Friday, December 1, at the Little Theatres.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.
