FILM

Three movies to rent this weekend:

Before Sunrise - http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/b/before_sun.html

Richard Linklater, the creator of Slackers and Dazed and Confused, has succeeded where many before him have failed -- in fashioning a modern-day romance that is both original and enthralling. Before Sunriseis nothing short of movie magic, and the kind of film that deserves to be remembered one long year from now when 1996's Oscar nominations are handed out. Even the best romantic comedy/dramas tend to be formula-driven, frequently relying more upon actor chemistry than plot. Surprises are about as foreign to this genre as a pacifist hero is to a shoot-'em-up. Somewhere along the way, a storyteller originated the basic love story structure. Film makers have religiously followed this roadmap, rarely taking more than an occasional minor detour. With Before Sunrise, however, Linklater not only travels an entirely different route, but heads for a new destination. Frankly, this is not the sort of film one usually expects to find in multiplexes. In fact, if it weren't in English, it might be possible to mistake this for the work of someone like Eric Rohmer. The plentiful and varied dialogue has a richness that few screenplays manage to capture. Most of Before Sunrise is talking. The characters touch on subjects ranging from language and reincarnation to sexuality and cable access shows. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Celine (Julie Delpy) on a train traveling through Europe. His destination is Vienna, where a flight back to America awaits him the next morning. She's on her way to Paris, where she starts classes at the Sorbonne next week. From their first moment of eye contact, they're drawn to each other. They share a meal in the lounge car, savoring the conversation more than the food, and when they arrive in Vienna, Jesse persuades Celine to disembark with him and keep him company wandering the streets until the time comes for his plane to depart. Thus begins an unforgettable screen romance. One of the first things to notice about Before Sunrise is how completely natural it all seems. Credit both director Linklater and his two leads. The rapport between Jesse and Celine is so lacking in artifice that at times the viewer feels like a voyeur. We are privy to everything, including the sort of "unimportant" dialogue that most films shy away from. Here, its inclusion is just one of many fresh elements.

Hawke and Delpy are nothing short of perfect. For this film to work, they have a threefold task: embrace their characters, attract each other, and connect with the audience. Needless to say, all are accomplished flawlessly. From the first stolen glance, there's never any question about their chemistry, and it takes no more time for the audience to be enraptured by Jesse and Celine than it does for them to fall for each other. Before Sunrise is about life, romance, and love. It magnifies the little things, paying scrupulous attention to the subtleties and mannerisms of body language. There's one scene where Jesse has to restrain himself from brushing away a stray lock of Celine's hair, and another wonderful moment in a music listening booth where the characters nervously avoid eye contact. This film is an amalgamation of such memorable scenes, yet, as they saying goes, the whole is more than a sum of its parts. Questions about fate and the transitory nature of relationships are raised, then left open for the audience to ponder. There are moments of unforced humor, and times of bittersweet poignancy. Before Sunrise speaks as much to the mind as to the heart, and much of what it says is likely to strike a responsive chord -- a rare and special accomplishment for any motion picture.

Short Cuts - Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" captures that uneasiness perfectly in its interlocking stories about people who seem trapped in the present, always juggling. The movie is based on short stories by Raymond Carver, but this is Altman's work, not Carver's, and all the film really has in common with its source is a feeling for people who are disconnected - from relatives, church, tradition - and support themselves with jobs that never seem quite real. It is hard work, no doubt, to be a pool cleaner, a chauffeur, a phone-sex provider, a birthday cake decorator, a jazz singer, a helicopter pilot, but these are professions that find you before you find them. How many people end up in jobs they planned for? Altman is fascinated by the accidental nature of life, by the way that whole decades of our lives can be shaped by events we do not understand or even know about.

"Short Cuts" understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters all live at the same time in the same city, and sometimes their paths even cross, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Imagine the rage of the baker (Lyle Lovett), for example, when he gets stuck with an expensive birthday cake. We could almost comprehend the cruel anonymous telephone calls he makes to the parents (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison) who ordered the cake, if we didn't know their child missed his birthday because he was hit by a car. Imagine what they would say to the unknown driver (Lily Tomlin) who struck their child. But we know that she wanted to take him to a doctor; the boy refused because he has been forbidden to get into the cars of strangers, and besides, he seemed OK. If you knew the whole story in this world, there'd be a lot less to be angry about. The movie's characters all seem to be from somewhere else, and without parents. Their homes are as temporary as the trailer park two of the characters inhabit, where people come and go, no one knows from where, or to where. The grandparent (Jack Lemmon) of the injured little boy has disappeared for years. Faced with a son and grandson he hardly knows, he spends most of his time talking about himself. The jazz singer would rather drink than know her daughter.

Sad, insoluble mysteries seem right under the surface. Three men go on a fishing trip and discover the drowned body of a dead woman. They have waited a long time and come a long way for this trip, and if they report the woman, their trip will be ruined. So, since she's already dead, what difference will a few more days make? And what would the police do, anyway? There's a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) in the movie, who seems to be a free-lancer, responsible to no one, using his badge simply as a way to get his will, spending a lot of time cheating on his wife (Madeleine Stowe), who finds his lies hilarious. Almost everybody drinks all through this movie, although only a few characters ever get exactly drunk. It's as if life is a preventable disease, and booze is the medication. Sex places a very slow second. The pool cleaner's wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) supplements the family income by working as a phone-sex performer, spinning verbal fantasies to strangers on the phone, while sitting bored in her living room, changing her baby's diapers. Her husband (Chris Penn) is angry: "How come you never talk that way to me?" Think about that. He's married to her. They sleep in the same bed. He can have actual physical sex with her. But he envies the strangers who will never meet her - who value her inaccessibility: She services their fantasies without imposing her own reality.

Some of these characters, if they could find each other, would find the answers to their needs. The baker, for example, has unexplored reserves of tenderness. He could help the sad young woman (Lori Singer) who plays the cello, and waits for those moments when her mother (Annie Ross), the jazz singer, is sober. The cop would probably be happier talking with the phonesex girl than carrying on his endless affairs, which have no purpose except to anger his wife, who is past caring. He likes the deception more than the sex, and could get off by telling the stranger on the other end of the phone that he'd been cheating with "another phone-sex girl. Yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying. They hope for better times. The hash-house waitress (Tomlin) loves her husband (Tom Waits), who is so good to her when he's not drinking that she forgives the dark times when he is drinking. The parents of the little boy find an unexpected consolation from the baker. The wife (Anne Archer) of one of the fly-fishermen finds a new resolve and freedom. Life goes on. Altman has made this kind of film before, notably in "Nashville" (1976) and "The Player" (1992). He doesn't like stories that pretend that the characters control their destinies, and their actions will produce a satisfactory outcome. He likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best, and some days it's just not good enough. He doesn't reproduce Raymond Carver's stories so much as his attitude.

In a Carver story there is typically a moment when an ordinary statement becomes crucial, or poetic, or sad. People get blinding glimpses into the real nature of their lives; the routine is peeled aside, and they can see they've been stuck in a rut for years, going through the motions. Sometimes they see with equal clarity that they are free to take charge, that no one has sentenced them to repeat the same mistakes. Carver died five years ago, at 50, of a brain tumor. He believed he would have died at 40, of alcoholism, if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy." Altman, who spent most of the 1980s in a sort of exile after Hollywood declared him noncommercial, continued to make films, but they didn't have the budgets or the distribution a great filmmaker should have had.

Chinatown - Chinatown" may be Roman Polanski's best film. It may be Jack Nicholson's best film as well, better than "Five Easy Pieces" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest". It starts out seemingly an ordinary detective story and murder mystery. However, the plot gets thicker and thicker as Nicholson unravels a massive real estate scheme and learns who is behind it. Nicholson plays a private investigator who works in Los Angeles during the 1930s. He is hired by a wife who suspects her husband is cheating.
Nicholson takes incriminating photos of him, which are used by the client to smear the husband, who then appears to have committed suicide. But nothing is as it appears, not the wife, the affair, or the suicide. Nicholson knows he has been duped, and is determined to learn the full story, which involves murder, real estate fraud, and an artificial water shortage. His investigation also uncovers terrible family secrets involving the murder victim's wife (Faye Dunaway) and her cantankerous, powerful father (John Huston).
Nicholson is well cast as the cynical and hard-working private eye. His character has similarities to Humphrey Bogart's in "The Maltese Falcon", but Nicholson's is not as sharp, and is more willing to con his way into gaining information. Likewise, Dunaway's character is similar to that of Mary Astor's in "The Maltese Falcon". Both characters seem unwilling to tell the full truth, and claim to love their hired detective, but Dunaway's is much softer and better intentioned. John Huston, more noted as a director than as an actor, gives a great performance as the grasping schemer who also wants the daughter he doesn't deserve to have. Roman Polanski has a great cameo as the enforcer with a knife. He will always be known more for his off-camera life than for the films that he has directed, but perhaps that isn't as it should be. "Chinatown" is an outstanding film, perhaps even the best film of the 1970s.