Desperate love, desperate measures

Three
movies playing around town right now tell tales of obsessive love spawning
disturbed behavior. A Slipping Down Life, a pleasantly rewarding indie film just
now making it into theaters after five years of technical wrangles, has the
most natural approach, and seems in danger of being overlooked for its lack of
sensationalism.

            The story, based on a novel by Anne
Tyler (The Accidental Tourist), takes
place in the South without making too much of it, and for once a natural range
of Southern accents can be found. More than anything else, though, it takes
place in the Land That Time Forgot.

            Lili
Taylor plays Evie, a depressed kiddie-fair-worker drifting about through the
dusty remnants of other eras. Everything in her small town, even the cars,
seems hopelessly vintage. This would be a little weird if it didn’t work
emotionally. (All of the film’s few flaws are discreet and relatively
unimportant.) The only contemporary thing in town, and thus her way out, is the
local music scene, which is where she discovers Drumstrings Casey (played by Guy
Pearce with impassive, grungy glamour).

            She seizes less upon his music
(penned by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, Vic Chestnutt, and Ron Sexsmith, and
sounding creditably like one author) than the pretentious, mystic ramblings he
interrupts himself with onstage. It’s a measure of what is great about this
movie that these spoken interludes are both mocked by the film and endorsed as
valid. Evie’s obsession leads her to a shocking, disturbed act, which the film
treats similarly (as do, charmingly, the other characters).

            The emotionally remote musician
allows his manager to exploit her as a promotional tool. From there, haltingly,
a relationship develops. Watching this play out is a pleasure that lies in the
performances, the nuances and rhythms of real life, and great underplayed
moments of throwaway humor.

            Bruno
Kirby and Clea DuVall make brief advertised appearances, but it’s Tom Bower as
Evie’s father, and Shawnee Smith as a raucously slutty acquaintance, that
should be the real draw. Whatever gets you into the theater, make sure it’s
soon — I was the only person at the screening I attended, so it may not be
around for long.

Criminal
Lovers (1999) also comes to us five years after its inception. French director
François Ozon’s (Swimming Pool)
second feature appears at first to just offer up two young attractive
psychopaths on the road, a boring cinematic trope by now if there ever was one.
But when they get lost in the woods and drift downstream in a boat, this cue of
Night of the Hunter tells us we are
launching on a dreamlike departure from the genre.

            Suffice it to say that they start to
seem pretty normal once they meet their match in a cabin-dwelling hermit who
uh, takes them in. While they deal with that, the film deftly portions out
flashbacks that increasingly fill in what at first seemed the sketchy, lazy
convention of the murder that kick-started their adventure.

            Criminal Lovers is so stately, measured,
and assured in the progression of its revelations that it was boggling to learn
that in France a DVD release places the events in chronological order. Lucky
for us, this version does not, and as it weaves in and out of psychological
realism and fairytale allegory, it just gets weirder and weirder. At times,
it’s so depraved as to be irresistible.

            Less so is France’s most recent hit,
Love
Me if You Dare, which has found success by sucking on Amélie‘s creative exhaust fumes. The
film starts out in full dazzle mode with the moment Julien and Sophie
inaugurate a back-and-forth game of dare that will last well into their adult
lives, mutating from an obnoxious children’s game of pranks to an obstacle that
keeps them from admitting their love for one another.

            The film rarely indulges the view of
the children as the brats they are, as it can ill afford to, although when it
does it not only feels more honest but makes them more sympathetic (the pranks
are a means of acting out the pain of their private lives). Instead the pair is
treated as miniature adults, with all kinds of witty dialogue. Precociousness
and preciousness are bound together with suffocating whimsy, and we are meant
to take delight in it.

            The visual flash, which felt
perfectly right in Amélie and City of God but feels like mere strategy
here, eventually settles down and is replaced by the wringing out of every drop
from annoying verbal conceits. If someone said something — ugh— symbolic as
a child, you can count on it being “cleverly” revisited more times
than can be counted when they are adults.

            I was eventually swept into the emotional
logic of the contrived premise, as with Criminal
Lovers, and it became interesting and fun to see the psychotic lengths the
two go to to ruin each other’s lives (as adults, the pranks move from hurting
other people to hurting each other).

            But
just as I was being won over, a bogus ending possessing less emotional logic
than discombobulating poetic pretension forced me away from its aims once more.
The poetic force of Criminal Lovers,
with strength in its thoughtful simplicity, is far more haunting.

A Slipping
Down Life (R),
directed by Toni Kalem, at Pittsford Plaza Cinema. Criminal Lovers (NR),
directed by François Ozon, at the Dryden Theatre, on Thursday, June 17. Love
Me If You Dare(R), directed
by Yann Samuell, at Little Theatres through Thursday, June 17.

This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2004.