[The Economist ] Philip Marlowe, meet Oliver Sacks
THE Californian hero (or villain?) in Christopher Nolan's fiendish new thriller, "Memento", suffers from short-term memory loss. As Leonard (Guy Pearce) tells us, he knows what happened before the rape and murder of his wife. But he can't convert present experience into memory, which is a drawback when plotting his revenge. Most of us feel that a single path has led us to the present and that the future opens out with several possibilities. Poor Leonard, by contrast, is always struggling to work out which of many possible paths have brought him to his "now". And since he'll forget again in a few moments, he has to scribble it down, take a polaroid or tattoo the information on his body. Oh, and just in case that makes the story-telling too simple, Mr Nolan has told the entire story backwards. The film starts with the story's end. Viewers can be seen in cinema lobbies long after the credits have rolled, arguing about what really happened. An ingenious website for "Memento", www.otnemem.com , is a help in unpicking the riddle. But it's probably more useful after you've seen the film, not before (if you can still tell which is which). The film, now showing in Europe, is due to open early next year in America.
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[The Economist ] A new film classic
MEN and women alike go into a sort of swoon when talking about ", the latest film from Wong Kar-Wai, a renowned Hong Kong director. It is possibly the most beautiful contemporary film on offer anywhere and certainly the most romantic one since "Brief Encounter" (1945) set post-war hearts fluttering.
Two couples move in to adjoining Hong Kong apartments on the same day sometime early in the 1960s. A series of coincidences persuades one of the husbands and one of the wives that their spouses, continually away on business trips, are having an affair. From this shared knowledge a parallel friendship develops. But they play by the prevailing rules. "We won't be like them," the betrayed wife says; and indeed they are not.
Despite evidence of a physical and emotional attraction&emdash;captured in the superb playing of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, in the glances they exchange and in the rapturous camerawork&emdash;this is a chaste relationship, setting it far and movingly apart from, say, "Random Hearts", the Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas film with a superficially similar plot.
Mr Wong's reputation was built on innovative pictures such as "Ashes of Time" and "Chungking Express" (both 1994), in which, with his regular cameraman Christopher Doyle, he pioneered a kaleidoscopic form of photography unique in contemporary cinema. Here he makes a U-turn and films as David Lean and George Stevens, two classical directors, did in their prime. This is Mr Doyle in a different register. Every shot is expressive and beautifully framed, every camera movement, fade-out and dissolve gauged for maximum impact.
The actors glide rather than walk into shot. Are they filmed in slow motion? Sometimes you can tell&emdash;when raindrops, for example, seem to pepper the ground. At other moments you cannot quite be sure, and the effect is to give the film a dream-like quality, reinforced by Michael Galasso's throbbing score and the use of Nat King Cole numbers, sung unexpectedly in Spanish, instead of the over-familiar song the title seems to portend.
Shrewdly, Mr Wong never shows us the adulterous pair. We hear only the husband's voice and half see the back of the wife's head. It is as if they are irrelevant, and all that really matters is the main love story which their affair sets in train.
In this spellbinding film, even the clothes&emdash;Ms Cheung has a costume change in almost every scene&emdash;are nostalgic and hypnotic. At the end, the director pulls off a master stroke. The world moves on; everything we have been drawn into becomes part of the ashes of time. Or does it? A final scene, set in Angkor Wat as a kind of epilogue, suggests that love, even if never fully expressed, somehow lasts forever.
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[The Economist] Looking life in the eye
Creatively speaking, French film is in one of its periodic upswings
IT IS hard to say exactly when it happened, but the feel and content of the best films from France have utterly changed. In the past two or three years new directors, many of them women, have hit the screens with powerful work that grapples, often literally, with the flesh and bones of experience. On film, as in so much contemporary French fiction, the current preoccupation, to use a slogan, is the body.
To realise how big a change this is, you need think back only to the 1980s, when the most creative French films were dominated by the "cinéma de look". The work of directors such as Jean-Jacques Beineix ("Diva"), Luc Besson ("Subway") and Leos Carax ("Bad Blood") were perfect embodiments of le look in its use of image, effects, pastiche and designer violence. At their best, they created beguiling or disturbing dream worlds. But their style was showily indebted to television, advertising and fashion, and no apology was made for marrying the art film to pop culture. Mr Besson made his name directing rock videos.
The directors, by contrast, who are now at the forefront of French cinema&emdash;Olivier Assayas, Cathérine Breillat, Claire Denis and Erick Zonca&emdash;return to human experience for their inspiration. They place their films firmly in a recognisable context, and they show respect for the past masters of modern French cinema. Their background is film school and film criticism, not advertising or television. Mr Assayas, for example, was the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine which started the careers of many new-wave directors in the early 1960s.
Theirs is a cinema of human intimacy&emdash;welcome or unwelcome&emdash;that is typified by the close shot that stays fixed on the film's actors. The excellent Agnès Godard, who filmed both Ms Denis's "Beau Travail" (2000) and Mr Zonca's "La Vie Rêvée des Anges" (1999), summed up this new cinematography well when she said: "The most inexhaustible landscapes for me remain faces and bodies." Ms Godard's camera gives characters the time and the sympathy to reveal themselves, whether they are ironing a shirt or working in a sewing factory.
Not that there is anything the least delicate or politically correct in these new films, which all revel in their physicality. In "Beau Travail", for example, soldiers from the French foreign legion practice in the middle of the North African desert, watched with amusement by the local African women, as they solemnly perform their drills for a campaign that may never happen. Ms Denis makes the men's earnest notions of honour and masculinity seem threatened and absurd against the vastness and emptiness of their surroundings. "Beau Travail", like many of Ms Denis's films, focuses on the fragility of cultural identities, on their reliance on binary opposites&emdash;male/female, black/white, coloniser/colonised&emdash;and on how easily they can be run together. In "Beau Travail", this elision occurs when the arrival of a gentle, almost effeminate new recruit throws Denis Lavant's rigid notions of masculinity into confusion. The film seethes with suppressed homoeroticism.
Ms Denis centres the conflict in human gesture. Each emotion is ritualised and embodied in the sombre drills the men perform. The freedom that the central character played by Mr Lavant finally wins from these mechanised drills is likewise expressed in gesture&emdash;in a wild, self-destructive solo dance he drunkenly performs in a disco in the last scene of the film. His dance is beautiful, but also desperate and formless. There is usually a note of nostalgia for collapsing orders in Ms Denis's work, unsurprisingly for someone who grew up in the last days of the French empire. As Mr Lavant explains it, freedom also comes with regret.
The director who takes present-day French cinema's preoccupation with the body furthest is Ms Breillat. "Romance" (1999) contains scenes of nudity, sex and bondage rarely seen outside the porn industry and caused an outcry when it first appeared in France. But the sex is there less to excite us than to show how power can confine and corrupt the closest of relationships. The complete whiteness of the apartment where the heroine Marie (Caroline Ducey) lives with her boorish and bed-shy partner conveys an atmosphere of sexual and emotional sterility. In its way, the film is meant as a commentary on pornography&emdash;on how, as with so many other genre films, it is safe and predictable. Ms Breillat refuses to allow us the feeling of knowing what to expect. Her film affronts us in ways that Antonin Artaud, the exponent of the theatre of cruelty, would have approved of.
There is no doubt that "Romance" is confused as a film, and its ending is frankly melodramatic and silly. Yet for all its shock value&emdash;the erect penises, the gynaecological probes and the slavvery crowning of a baby's head in birth (men will probably be more upset than women)&emdash;"Romance" is trying to say something about how selectively we conceal or display the raw facts of our physical nature.
In leaving behind the beautiful fantasies and flashy camerawork of an earlier generation, these new film makers have not gone back to traditional stories told in traditional ways. Nor are they without their cinematic debts and influences. If there is one director who you could call their artistic godfather it would be Maurice Pialat, who made "Van Gogh" (1991) and "Sous le Soleil de Satan" (1987). Like him, they aspire to look life in the eye, even if the result, for an entertainment medium, is often bleak.