Drive was one of the most distinctive films of 2011 so when I learned that it borrowed liberally from this 1981 movie, that definitely put it on my radar. It also helps that I consider Heat , probably the film for which Michael Mann is most famous, to contain some of the best gunplay scenes ever captured on film. So right from the opening shot with the camera ever so slowly panning down a tenement block to the rain-slicked street at night, I felt right at home.
Normally, there are several reliable warning signs to look out for to tell whether a particular science-fiction film deserves to be taken seriously. One is whether or not it knows its stuff when it talks about hacking computers. The Signal passes this test. Another is how closely the protagonist hews to the Hollywood action hero stereotype. Here Brendon Thwaites plays MIT student Nic Eastman who has muscular dystrophy. He looks dorky enough to just about pass muster and fallible enough on his crutches to drop the coffee he has just bought.
The two previous entries of the trilogy starred female leads who were already known to me. Rouge stars Irène Jacob, an actress I know nothing about and who seems to have become famous mainly since appearing in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s previous film La Double vie de Véronique. Yet she is easily the most beautiful and charming of the three. Appropriately enough, for as some reviewers have put it, she plays the role of Beauty against Truth as incarnated in the person of Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Joseph Kern.
For all that I constantly rag on about the shallowness and mediocrity of most Hollywood films, I continue to be impressed by how thoroughly they’ve mastered the essentials of film-making so long ago. All That Heaven Allows, a film that was considered unremarkable at the time of its release is, I think, a good case in point. Even without considering any of the more subtle messaging that may or may not be present, it’s a solid movie that impresses with its sumptuous visuals, competent acting, excellent cinematography and just enough of a twist to the conventional formula to make a romance story refreshing.
When I wrote about the first part of this trilogy, I mentioned how each film corresponds with a colour of the French national flag but didn’t talk about how each colour also corresponds with one of the values of the French national motto. In the case of Bleu, I found its interpretation of liberty in a personal sense to be interesting but not especially insightful. In the case of Blanc, it is impossible to see it as anything other than an explicit attempt at the restoration of equality.
Our oft-mentioned but unnamed cinephile friend claimed that this film left him flummoxed. For that alone, even if The Double weren’t already on our watch list, I would have put it there. Of course, after I’d watched it, it was my turn to be bewildered. But as my wife explained, this is a film that does most of its work on a symbolic level. While there are plenty of ambiguities over who’s real and what happened, trying to work out some sort of literal truth is a fool’s errand. What matters is understanding its themes and they mean.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy is on the recommended list of a Coursera course that my wife is taking on the making of short films, so expect to see me write about all three of them in short order. This post covers the first of them which stars Juliette Binoche and is by most accounts the most accomplished of the three.