Bluesy and Trap Review The Festival Flicks

How I got into an Argument … (my sex life)
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin, written by Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu, starring Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Emmanuel Salinger, Marianne Denicourt, Thibault de Montalembert, Chieara Mastroianni, Denis Padalydes, Jeanne Balibar

illtown
Directed and written by Nick Gomez, starring Michael Rapaport, Lili Taylor, Adam Trese, Kevin Corrigan, Angela Featherstone, Tony Danza, Isaac Hayes, Paul Schulze, Saul Stein


Trap: Indie films these days seem to come in one of two flavors: the twentysomething schmoozefest and the lowlife crime drama. Although American examples of the former, such as Kicking and Screaming and The Pompatus of Love, derive first and foremost from Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering that its origins are in the French New Wave, particularly the films of Eric Rohmer. The second type traces its roots back to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and includes such films as Reservoir Dogs and Laws of Gravity – this latter by Nick Gomez, the director of the second of today’s selections, illtown. It’s worth taking the former strain’s French origins into account when considering Arnaud Desplechin’s How I Got into an Argument … (my sex life), a contemporary French example of the form and a film every bit as ungainly as its title. Although no doubt Desplechin feels he is hearkening back to such illustrious predecessors as Rohmer and Truffaut, after watching his gaggle of self-absorbed young academics go on for nearly three hours, I couldn’t help thinking I’d just sat through the world’s longest episode of Friends – except, being French, they were yammering pointlessly about philosophy instead of pop-cultural trivia

Bluesy: Actually, I think it reminded me more like what the sequel to My Dinner With Andre would be like, sans food and a dinner companion... with a progressive slide show of female characters crying, throwing things and going to the bathroom, parading around in the background. If you’re into sitting patiently, while some self-absorbed academy pipsqueek with the body of a tennis shoe pontificates his every thought about every woman who has managed to hopelessly throw herself at him or leave the other peripheral male characters (who are supposed to be this guy’s friends… as if anybody would actually want to hang around with him… right), just to let this guy pick his teeth with the heels of their stilletos… then THIS is the movie for you.

Come to think of it, the lead character, Paul (Mathieu Amalric), reminded me a lot of what it’s like to sit through a long, very bad date. After 10 minutes of Paul’s whining, I had the distinct urge to leap onto the screen and slap him, until he either shut up or had some sense struck into him. Maybe this is just the sort of reaction director Desplechin was looking for. If so, I think it’s carrying this neo-realism thing a tad too far.

Trap: Well, I didn’t take it quite that personally, but I see your point. Paul spends the entire film bouncing from one woman to the other, complaining about their inadequacies all the while, but hardly spurning their improbably-offered advances. No sooner has he succumbed to one than he is scheming to dump her. This quickly becomes wearying and if one imagines that the amount of time the director devotes to this grad school soap opera somehow manages to invest it with depth and insight, think again – the characters may strew their conversations with references to Kierkegaard and Hegel but this is little more than window dressing that does little to disguise their fundamental banality – after all, a trivial conversation about a weighty subject is still a trivial conversation.

Bluesy: If the characters in (My Sex Life) are stuck in Sartre-land, than it’s interesting to me that the American indie we saw today interestingly enough is another sort of hell on earth… but certainly not murder to watch. In fact, while I wouldn’t call illtown a perfect film by any means, I would call parts of it luminescent. Any film with Isaac Hayes playing God already is on the right track for me.

Twisted, dark, challenging but not overly difficult illtown tells the story of small time drug dealers who pushed cocaine in the late 80’s, being replaced by adolescent harpies bearing guns with no conscious and a yen for using all the likable characters in the film as some sort of shoot-em-up video game targets. No doubt this is what’s become of the Children of the Damned.

I found myself bemused and strangely affected by the threesome of Dante (Michael Rapaport, who seems eminent to replace Eric Stoltz as one of the most sensitive and well rounded indie actors on the scene), Suzanne (the effervescent Lili Taylor) and Francis (Kevin Corrigan, who’s pulled in another fine performance after Walking and Talking). They may be drug dealers but they come off as sympathetic heroes compared to their adversary, who’s come back from their past to haunt them, Gabriel (Adam Trese, doing a fine Antonio Banderas on smack impersonation) and his band of wild children from hell. I especially liked the scenes with Rapaport and Taylor, who shared a special quiet intimacy in most every scene that they have together. These two have a chemistry that’s not lusty, but loving. I’d like to see them paired together in another film… and I’d like to see Director, Nick Gomez finally get some decent money to work with.

While I enjoyed the storytelling and the craft he’s exuded in illtown, some of the production values, including the excessive use of smoke in scenes which weren’t always matched in reverse angles got in the way from time to time. The choice of music, however, was crafty and emotional. Sure, pairing violent scenes with old sappy love songs has been done in the past… but it doesn’t particularly feel tired or overused in this case.

Trap: I have to give Gomez credit -- after the down-and-dirty documentary-style realism of Laws of Gravity and New Jersey Drive, he seems determined to push his work in another direction stylistically, and although he doesn’t always manage to pull it off, his ambition still impresses. With its deliberate pacing, acid-trip color palette, incongruous use of music and oddly-syncopated editing rhythms, the film seems like some sort of fever dream – Miami Vice reinterpreted as a descent into hell. Many scenes start out as static tableaux only to erupt into violence at unpredictable moments, adding to the hallucinatory atmosphere, and although many of Gomez’ stylistic conceits seem a little too mannered (when Gabriel re-enters Dante and Suzanne’s lives he fades into the scene like a ghost – an overly literal metaphor that seems even more obvious when repeated twice again over the course of the film), overall he hits more often than he misses. illtown may not be a perfect film, or even an entirely satisfying one, but it’s an interesting experiment by a filmmaker whose best work is yet to come.

Bluesy: I don’t really agree that it had anything like a Michael Mann quality myself. And I liked the use of ghostly fades… if he had but used it once or twice, it wouldn’t have worked for me as a concept. Rather because it’s a repeated choice, it holds the thing together for me. Even so, I do agree that it’s interesting enough to whet my appetite enough to see what Gomez and his gang are going to come up with next. Say goodnight, Trap.

Trap: Goodnight, Trap.

How I Got Into An Argument:  Irritating Stultifying

Illtown: GoodNear-Miss

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