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Also this issue: Punch Drunk De-mock-cracy |
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August 22-28, 2002
movies
 Curse the darkness: Rudd, with dim light, in The Château. |
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The ChâteauWritten and directed by Jesse Peretz An IFC Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
Rarely has a foreign language been mangled to such deliriously comic effect as it is in The Château. Three minutes within earshot of any spot on the Champs-Elysées will convince you that speaking bad French is the easiest thing in the world, but as Graham Granville, a guileless Midwesterner who learns that he’s inherited a French château from an uncle he never knew he had, Paul Rudd does things to the language that ought to be illegal (and in France, probably are). For the most part, writer/director Jesse Peretz avoids the comic cliche of having Graham speak in complete but inappropriate sentences, instead equipping him with a half-right mélange which sounds more ungainly the closer it gets to actual French. One exception to the no-complete-sentences rule which gives the movie its subtitle: After a starving Graham has been fed a plate of potatoes upon his arrival, he enthusiastically exclaims “Je t’aime, patate!”
As if inheriting a crumbling, debt-encumbered castle, complete with a suspicious, not to say hostile domestic staff weren't bad enough, Graham is accompanied by his co-inheritor and adopted brother Allen (Romany Malco), who's more eager to get back to his Internet sexual aid business than to work out the details of what to do with this medieval money pit. Malco, last seen playing MC Hammer in the VH1 biopic, has the less forgiving role, and his constant urgings to seal the deal and catch the first flight back seem more petulant than pragmatic. In an awkward drunken monologue, Graham strips away Allen's affected street façade -- "Ooh, the mean streets of Evanston," he sneers. "How'd you make it out?" -- but the script offers no chance for Malco to show anything else, nor is it ever close to believable that he and Graham were raised together. Their pairing has the contrived feel of a Rush Hour sequel, without the comfort of falling back on reflexive racial stereotypes. Graham is every bit the drifting mid-20s failure, frantically calling his therapist from a phone booth in town, but Allen's no more than a wall for him to bounce off.
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Speaking of which, the ch‰teau's staff aren't quite as you'd expect them either. More Gothic than gallic, they're less hostile than panicked. Working in the ch‰teau, it's clear, has been their entire lives; you can practically hear the air hiss out of the room when they realize that Graham and Allen have come to sell the house, not save it. Seeing Sylvie Testud as the troubled chambermaid, it's hard not to be haunted by her more resonant performance in Murderous Maids, though the worst Graham and Allen ever get is an unkind look.
Shot in grainy digital video, The Ch‰teau has a loose, improvised feel at its best -- when the necessities of plot intrude, they do so stumblingly, and without satisfaction. (One stray reference hangs over the movie for the better part of an hour, revived only for a final plot twist.) Rudd's performance is so dramatically the highlight that Peretz might be better credited as enabler than director. The movie seems to work best when it has no direction at all.
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