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Also this issue: Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign The Punk Moms' Club |
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August 1- 7, 2002
movies
 the act we act: My Wife Is an Actress’ Attal plays himself, more or less. |
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My Wife Is an ActressWritten and directed by Yvan Attal A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse.
recommended
Full Frontal Directed by Steven Soderbergh A Miramax release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
Heralded as it was by the one-two punch of Out of Sight and The Limey, Steven Soderbergh’s transition from arty, low-budget features to clever, big-budget genre reinventions seemed like a blessed event, marking him as both an artist and a tradesman, able to tinker with the machinery with one hand while using the other to shoo audiences through the gate. Soderbergh reinvented his visual style and work method, ditching pristine compositions and elaborate cinematography (indeed, cinematographers altogether) for a fast-paced, open-ended modus operandi that often finds him acting not only as his own director of photography, but his own camera operator as well. From there, it was perhaps inevitable that he’d move on to the promise of digital self-sufficiency, and the result is Full Frontal, a hermetic, self-regarding tale of life in the Hollywood food chain.
Full Frontal was originally conceived as a "sequel" to sex, lies and videotape, but this time the jerking off takes place behind the camera, not in front of it. At times, the movie seems designed to demonstrate no more than Soderbergh's definitive membership in the Tinseltown in-crowd. You half expect him to turn up behind you and whisper in your ear, "Look, I got Julia Roberts to dye her hair! And there's Brad Pitt -- you know, from Ocean's Eleven? -- doing an unbilled cameo! And me and Fincher, we're like this."
Where The Anniversary Party used a group setting to explore the overlapping Venn diagrams of Hollywood social circles, Full Frontal keeps its cast of under a dozen from interacting in more than twos or threes, the better to pin them to the wall like captured social butterflies. (The film's opening breaks their personalities down into categories, just in case we might be tempted to form our own opinions.) And what a collection they are. There's Lee (Catherine Keener), a 40-year-old human resources exec who takes out the frustrations of her desperately unhappy marriage by torturing unsuspecting job applicants; Carl (David Hyde Pierce), her equally unhappy husband, who hasn't got the spine to hold down a job turning out celebrity puff pieces; Linda (Mary McCormack), Lee's sister, a massage therapist adrift in her mid-30s, reduced to meeting men over the Internet; and Arty (Enrico Colantoni), a chronically single playwright whose latest bid for success is a tongue-in-cheek one-man show about Hitler. All in all, they're perhaps the most fatuous, micron-deep collection of characters since Mike Figgis' Timecode, which similarly tried to hide its shallowness beneath a cloud of video murk.
It's impossible, of course, for a movie to have no style (even no style is a style), but Full Frontal does its damnedest. The videotape in sex, lies and videotape looked better. Shooting with a lightweight "prosumer" camera might have made Soderbergh feel like a kid with a new train set, but it also results in an appallingly degraded image that doesn't fulfill even the basic requirements of narrative intelligibility. Though familiar with Mary McCormack's work, it took me 45 minutes until the camera got close enough to her face for me to identify her -- further off than a few feet, and facial features dissolve into a semi-shapeless blur. It's all very trendy, very acting workshop vérité, but it also forces the audience to accept as real, or else wholly reject, a scenario too contrived and two-dimensional to function as anything like real life. When the camera catches the title of Carl's play -- The Sound and the Führer -- on the theater marquee, you don't know whether to laugh or wince.
Interwoven with all of this are scenes from a movie being filmed by Francesca (Julia Roberts) and Calvin (Blair Underwood). Shot in conventional Hollywood style (though the snippets we see don't seem to fit any stock plot), they're no more engrossing than the rest of the movie, but they at least provide a welcome respite from the blunt ugliness of the video segments. It's takes a good long while before Soderbergh deigns to show us either of the two outside of their roles within roles, which more than one person involved with Full Frontal no doubt thinks is a pretty clever trick. And indeed, the moment when Francesca steps out of her wardrobe, and Roberts goes from one unfamiliar look to an even more unfamiliar one, does touch off a pretty potent double take. But Full Frontal only pretends to lift the veil. It's showing us the man behind the curtain, but it doesn't stop to consider that the man's not what's interesting -- it's the curtain.
Solipsistic to a fault, Full Frontal feeds off Hollywood in-jokes: faux Los Angeles Magazine covers, autoerotically asphyxiating producers, actors who duck out of rehearsal to teach a Pilates class. Coleman Hough's script even nods to the gossip pages by concocting a romance between Roberts' character and a hunky crew member (Brad Rowe), a fumble-fingered reference to her then-relationship (now marriage) to a cinematographer. With the whole world weaned on E! and Entertainment Weekly, such in-jokes aren't really in-, but that just makes Full Frontal seem even more irrelevant; it's not even teaching us anything we don't know. The movie's style is less Altman than car-wreck Cassavetes, but Soderbergh's cast of seasoned pros doesn't have anything to prove. Liberated from the chains of hair and makeup, Julia Roberts acts pretty much like Julia Roberts. Either that's really her or else her star persona is durable enough to resist digital manhandling. What Full Frontal eventually has to tell us is that real life isn't like the movies, which no one who doesn't live in Hollywood is ever apt to forget. The only real audience for it is the people on the screen.
My Wife Is an Actress brings to bear the sense of perspective that Full Frontal so woefully lacks. Written and directed by Yvan Attal, the movie stars Attal as Yvan, a sports journalist whose wife, Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is, you guessed it, an actress, and whose celebrity is a constant thorn in her husband's side.
No points for guessing that Attal and Gainsbourg are husband and wife in real life. But My Wife develops far beyond its film à clef premise. It may be that you have to see Yvan's jealousy, his bitterness, his petulance as a comic extrapolation of whatever Attal's real feelings might be -- otherwise, watching the movie would be like eavesdropping on a couple fighting in a restaurant. Movie-Charlotte's last name is never revealed, and Attal points up the subterfuge by following each invocation with a loud noise (a car-door slam, for example) which blots out whatever her surname might be. (Charlotte's first-name status resonates with Nicky Katt's pretentious Full Frontal actor, who's fond of dropping phrases like "I was talking to Tom. [Beat.] Sizemore.") Attal never cuts down to the bone, but he doesn't pretend to. When Charlotte's uncomfortable getting naked for a love scene, her British director has the whole crew strip off, but while the crew's bodies are filmed in unflattering truth, Attal catches his wife from behind, her hip perfectly cocked, curves glowing, a movie dream even before the cameras start rolling. My Wife Is an Actress celebrates cinema even as it acknowledges the wounds it causes; Full Frontal both exaggerates the damage and degrades the art form.
