April 2, 2004

Welcome to the first really good movie weekend of this year…

And of course, it’s overloaded.

Hellboy doesn’t need the tall walking Rock swinging at him. Home on the Range doesn’t need Julia Stiles forcing the pre-teen and teen girls to make their first real choice all year. But there we are.

If you look at the tracking, the quartet of films will bring in well over $60 million between them. And while the “boy flicks” get next weekend free, the girls are facing Miramax’s quickly heating Ella Enchanted and The Girl Next Door to boot, which should do bit better with girls than earlier expected. The week after that, it’s Uma vs. The Punisher vs. the still-likely-to-be-warm boy from hell. And who knows… The Rock might become a friend with Mel benefits.

In other words… welcome to Summer 2004.

(15 Weeks Of Summer launches on the Van Helsing week at MCN, but a 15 Weeks Summer Preview will run next week.)

That said, I want to slow things down a little. The best two movie experiences I’ve had this week – with due respect to my second look at Hellboy – were sit downs with two enormously talented directors from two countries whose films have a hard time getting the attention they deserve in this country.

Gabriele Salvatores’ Mediterraneo won the Best Foreign Language Oscar a dozen years ago. Seven films later, we are finally being treated to a look at his work in the United States with the eerie, intimate I’m Not Scared.

Salvatores does not come to the table with the demeanor of a director. He is relaxed, easy to smile, open. He is a man with a job that just happens to be one of the glamour jobs in the world. But he is more interested in trying new things, finding new answers and getting on to the hard work of bringing his latest idea to life than in lingering endlessly in his past.

The last time it looked like a Salvatores film was going to land in the U.S., it failed to get closer than Canada. Nirvana, a sci-fi, action, cyber-comedy, was bought by Miramax in 1997, but the effort to dub the film in English proved disastrous and the Weinsteins lost their taste for the project.

But Salvatores is a patient man. He waded through auditions for the young lead of I’m Not Scared and a few minutes after auditions ended, a young man came into the hall and apologized for being late, but had been kept late by his responsibilities within his family and to his job. Gabriele knew right away that this was the boy.

Just as Salvatore speaks about feeling his way with actors, auditioning by meeting and connecting with his actors, so does Anne Fontaine. But Ms. Fontaine could not be more different than Mr. Salvatore.

Of course, the first thing that strikes you as you meet Ms. Fontaine is her remarkable mature beauty. Her tendency towards emotional distance is a topic that will come up over and over in the conversation. But it is that Catherine Deneuve thing. Her husband, who I learn is her producer, stays with us to make sure that she has support for the few weak spots in her English. I later learn that this man, although has a lot to say yet for the purposes of this chat subjugates his thoughts to allow his wife’s to remain the focus, is Philippe Carcassonne, one of France’s most important producers. I could easily have spent hours chatting with him about his work with Patrice Leconte, Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, Claude Sautet and Banoit Jacquot amongst other remarkable filmmakers.

But it was hard to take my eyes off of his wife…

Ms. Fontaine’s Nathalie was one of my favorite films at Toronto this year. The follow-up to the also remarkable How I Killed My Father, Fontaine focused more closely on a subject that seems to be a theme in her earlier work, romance, love and sex. Nathalie tells the story of a woman who fears that her husband may be looking elsewhere for romance. So she wanders into the world of working girls and gives one, Nathalie, the mission of seducing her husband. The results, throughout the film, cause audiences to examine and reexamine their ideas of love and lust and the power of our vulnerability.

Perhaps Fontaine’s most remarkable achievement in the film is the performances she brought out of her three iconic leads – Fanny Ardant, Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart. The first distinction is easy to catch. Depardieu has not been this svelte in years. But that’s nothing, really. Fanny Ardant, who has the movie star ability to propel a scene with the flinch of a nostril, gives the most interior performance I have ever seen her given. Beart, who has never quite blossomed past the role of beautiful waif, as Isabel Adjani has, gives a complex and nuanced performance that is even more interesting in post-screening retrospect. And Depardieu is, indeed, light on his feet while weighted down by distraction. His actorly tricks, now so familiar, are rarely in evidence. Yet he is still every inch the movie star.

Fontaine and Carcassonne are a fascinating couple. My time with them barely allowed me to scratch their surface. I pressed them about my personal frustration that Nathalie, while sure to be ably distributed by Wellspring, didn’t get bought by a bigger company… much like How I Killed My Father and last year’s Carcassonne-produced Read My Lips. The sure-footed Carcassonne simply noted the downturn in box office for French films in America, including his own. I pressed Fontaine on how she allowed intimate silences to be such a powerful part of her films. She was just following her instincts.

We talked about the good and bad points of some actors, the danger of negotiating with Miramax and not getting the deal done (no one else wants sloppy seconds) and my ethnic background.

Gabriele Salvatores is working on his first English-language film, an Italian/Canadian co-production about, appropriately enough, Italians coming to Canada. But he isn’t anxious to sell out and go American. In his early 50s, he knows that he only has a certain number of films left in his career and he wants to make the most of every opportunity.

Asking Anne Fontaine if she wants to sell out would bring only cool doubt to her face. Her films have a great deal of style without being about style. She is a cool ironist with a hot pulsing wave of blood rushing to whichever throbbing wound her characters are suffering… often before they even realize they are bleeding.

To think that we, here in the U.S., are rarely given the chance to see the entire work product of directors like these – and more famous directors too – is to realize how much we miss here in spite of our unending availability of media. These are the movies that make young people realize that they need to get behind a camera and create. The elements that these directors bring to the table… a commitment to the humanity of their characters and the pace that allows us to experience the heat, the moisture and the subtle agonies of human flesh… are not lost to American film, but too infrequently experienced anymore.

I do enjoy my Hellboy. But when we look for the intellectual rigor and passion of bygone days, they are not far away. The chance to sit at a table with the minds and spirits of Fontaine and Salvatores… ah…

Have a great weekend at the movies. And then, go rent something foreign and brilliant. Grab a doc. A romance. Every basic movie food group. Manga.

READER OF THE DAY: JD ON SET writes: “I just saw Shattered Glass last night, which has me thinking about exactly what you wrote about yesterday. The movie made a very strong point about the personal responsibilities of journalists... if everyone hides behind what they *can* do, they won't pay attention to what they *should* do. The system has enough holes in it to allow indiscretions (Glass, Jayson Blair et al) if the guilty parties don't check themselves. And everyone is to blame... pressured writers, shoddy fact-checkers, bamboozled editors, pragmatic colleagues, and trusting readers.

It's scary to think how many people take major media sources at face value, simply because of assumptions about the media. "They have editors to verify all of this information!" "They couldn't possibly be so irresponsible, it's the news!" And so on. Just like writers have a responsibility to write as truthfully as they can, readers have a responsibility to filter what they are told appropriately. Few people do.”

E ME: Tell me about your weekend haul!