WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A BREAKTHROUGH
All Over Me, a tale of friends and identity
Photo: Bill Foley
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Two Melbourne film-school students seek a new roommate as
they blunder through a very bad day in Love and Other Catastrophes, a
perky first feature from twenty-three-year-old Australian filmmaker
Emma-Kate Croghan. Self-absorbed but resourceful Mia (Frances O'Conner)
wrestles with university bureaucracy as she tries to transfer to the department
of a beloved lecturer and author of a book on "feral cinema," while agonizing
over her commitment to her girlfriend Danni (Radha Mitchell). Meanwhile, Mia's
roommate Alice (Alice Garner) obsesses over her (four years late) dissertation
on "Doris Day as Feminist Warrior" and frets that she will never find a man to
meet her stringent requirements. By day's end the two women have met some of
their goals and grown wiser about the ways of love. Love and Other
Catastrophes is an unsteady screwball comedy whose philosophy of life
("There are advantages to monogamy." "What?" "You're not alone") is decidedly
twentysomething-lite. Yet Croghan has a wicked visual flair, modeled on the
grungy anarchic energy of Kevin Smith (Clerks) and other low-budget
American filmmakers, a fresh way with words (together with co-writers Yael
Bergman and Helen Bandis), and a canny eye to the market that catapulted her
from film school into commercial distribution. Less eager to please but far
more substantial as a coming-of-age story is Alex and Sylvia Sichel's
All Over Me, a visually assured, emotionally daring film starring the
gifted Alison Folland (To Die For) as a troubled Hell's Kitchen
adolescent who channels her loneliness into unrequited love for her
self-destructive best pal (Tara Subkoff), until she finds a richer friendship
with a fellow "riot grrl" who helps her discover her own flowering identity.
| April 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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THINGS TO DO IN PARIS WHEN YOU'RE UNDEAD
The deadly Maggie Cheung
Photo: Zeitgeist Films
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Films about filmmaking can be risky business:
what seems funny to a director
often translates as little more than insider joking to an audience uninitiated
or indifferent to movie politics. Not so with Irma Vep, a fresh and
hilarious comedy from French director and former critic Olivier Assayas.
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut's alter ego and his leading man in several
films, beginning with The 400 Blows, stars as René Vidal, a
washed-up, self-dramatizing director from the French New Wave, with more than a
passing resemblance to Truffaut, who's struggling to revitalize his career.
Riding old and new waves, Vidal casts Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung as
Irma Vep in a pointlessly arty remake of the 1915 Louis Feuillade cult-classic
serial Les Vampirs. Charming and modest, the gorgeous Cheung wanders
between hotel, movie set, and the streets of night-time Paris dressed in a
rubber suit modeled after Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman costume in Batman
Returns, trying to get a grip on what the moody director wants from her
while fending off the advances of an excitable costume designer (Nathalie
Richard). Before long jet lag and the extracurricular feuds of the movie crew
threaten to dislodge Cheung's sense of the boundaries between her role and her
self, and as the director spirals into nervous breakdown, panic grips the set.
Irma Vep does sterling duty as a wry commentary on the state of French
cinema as it grapples with the inroads of Hollywood. But the movie also holds
up beautifully as a delirious comedy of boisterous French manners.
| April 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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CADAVEROUS LIAISONS
Pondering the fatality attraction
Photo: Kharen Hill
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For a film about necrophilia, Canadian director Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed
is tender, meditative, and delightfully free of pat psychology. As a child
Sandra Larson (Molly Parker) conducted funeral services for dead mice. As an
adult she conducts love affairs with cooperatively supine corpses at the
funeral parlor where she works as an embalmer. "Every thought you act on pushes
you further out," Sandra solemnly tells her jealous boyfriend Matt (Peter
Outerbridge), as he becomes more and more obsessed with her extracurricular
amours. Stopkewich and co-screenwriter Angus Fraser walk a line between comedy
and drama with such agility that by the end of the film you come to see the
world from Sandra's matter-of-fact point of view. Stopkewich merrily informed
audience members at the Sundance Film Festival who found the movie's subject
sick or arcane that the waiting list at her local library for the story on
which the film was based was six months long. So there.
| April 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly
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