"Love And Death On Long Island" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
In what is - especially by summer standards - an exceptionally strong week for new releases, two of the films opening today are engaging variations on the recurring theme of how opposites attract. The spin in both cases, however, is that that sexual attraction is a one-way street between protagonists with contrasting sexual preferences.
In one film, a pregnant young woman falls hopelessly in love with a gay man of her own age; in the other, a widower finds himself drawn irresistibly to a heterosexual and much younger man. The latter is Love And Death On Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski's impeccable screen treatment of Gilbert Adair's eloquent and succinct post-modern 1990 novel.
One of the wittiest, most touching and most satisfying films to arrive here this year, it features John Hurt as the reclusive writer Giles de'Ath, a middle-aged widower far removed from the modern world - until he goes to the cinema one afternoon.
Locked out of home during a downpour, he impulsively decides to check out the latest screen adaptation of an E.M. Foster novel, a prospect that puzzles and intrigues him. Never having been in a multiplex before, he wanders into the wrong auditorium and happens upon Hotpants College II. Initially aghast at the sheer crassness of what he sees, he nonetheless finds himself becoming infatuated with the movie's teen heart-throb star, Ronnie Bostock, played by Jason Priestley from the TV series, Beverly Hills 90210. Soon helplessly besotted by the young actor, De'Ath employs the new-fangled invention of video to check out his back catalogue, which includes such efforts as Tex Mex and Skid Marks, and he finds himself buying teen magazines such as Sugar in his quest for scraps of information on his idol. Giles becomes such an expert on the object of his desire that he imagines himself on Mastermind, shooting back the answers on the highly unlikely specialist subject that is the life and work of Ronnie Bostock.
His obsession eventually takes him to Long Island, in the hope of ingratiating himself with Ronnie, who lives there with his girfriend. Were the second half of this movie set on the west rather than the east coast of America, it might well have been titled De'Ath in Venice Beach, so replete is it with clever, pointed references to Thomas Mann's novella and Luchino Visconti's subsequent film. This is Richard Kwietniowski's first feature film after a number of notable short films which included the 1989 Flames Of Passion, a wordless reworking of Brief Encounter as a gay fantasy. Skilfully adapted and directed by Kwietniowski, Love And Death On Long Island is smart, sophisticated and seductive in its picture of a character utterly in thrall to emotions he never recognised within himself - and in its observations on the power of cinema to tap so effectively into the viewer's subconscious.
Its achievements are anchored in a sublime performance by John Hurt that stands among his finest work. Hurt is marvellously expressive and deadpan as a man so wholly perplexed by the complications of the modern world that he mistakes a microwave for a television set - and even more perplexed by the confusions brought on by the obsession which drives him so single-mindedly. He is ably supported by the aptly cast Jason Priestley as a character who, more obviously, cannot distinguish between Rimbaud and Rambo, and by Fiona Loewi as Ronnie's more alert, and suspicious, girlfriend.
"The Object Of My Affection" (15) Nationwide
If it were a Friends episode, The Object Of My Affection might have been titled The One In Which The One Who Plays Rachel Falls For A Gay Guy. Happily, Nicholas Hytner's film is substantially more ambitious than a formulaic Friends show. And while the cast of Friends has not shown any significant discretion - nor made any significant impression - in its choice of big-screen roles, a deglamorised Jennifer Aniston breaks the mould with The Object Of My Affection.
Based on a novel by Stephen McCauley, Wendy Wassestein's screenplay could be seen as Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy with the sexes reversed. In Smith's film, Ben Affleck played a heterosexual illustrator too deeply infatuated with a young woman to give up when he learns she is lesbian.
In Nicholas Hytner's film, Jennifer Aniston plays Nina, a New York social worker who offers a room in her apartment to a young gay teacher (Paul Rudd) when he is dropped abruptly by his lover (Tim Daly). When she becomes pregnant, she asks George, for whom she is falling, if he will act as the father of her child.
She clearly hasn't seen the new Impulse commercial featuring a chance encounter in which the hopes of a woman are raised briefly before she realises that the man who catches her eye is involved with his male companion. Perhaps Nina takes consolation in Tom Robinson's transition from singing Glad To Be Gay, to a heterosexual relationship and fatherhood, or altogether less likely, from the marriages of Rock Hudson or Elton John. The film could usefully have explored this angle in some more depth, just as it ought to have given more thought to its fairly pat resolution. How Nina's relationship with George can by reconciled with his homosexual urges is the pivot of this contrived but engrossing and likeable serious comedy in which Paul Rudd (who was the stepbrother in Clueless) exudes a winning charm. The fine supporting cast includes Alan Alda as a high-profile literary agent forever nonchalantly dropping names, Allison Janney as his match-making wife, John Pankow as Nina's lawyer lover, and a delightfully droll Nigel Hawthorne as a gay and waspish theatre critic.
This bittersweet film is sensitively and skilfully assembled by Nicholas Hytner who made The Madness Of King George and The Crucible for the cinema, and directed the London and Dublin stage productions of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple Of Inishmaan.
"Hana-Bi" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The prolific Japanese director, actor, writer, performance artist and television personality, Takeshi Kitano, delivers his most thoughtful, tender and emotionally involving movie to date in Hana-Bi which won him the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival last autumn. The film's title is ambiguous: hanabi is the Japanese word for fireworks; in its hyphenated use, however, it weds the film's twin themes - hana, meaning flower, as a symbol of life, and bi, meaning fire, represents gunfire and becomes the symbol of death.
Takeshi Kitano takes the leading role of Nishi, a taciturn former detective who, on one fateful day, learns that his wife has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and that his police partner is paralysed in a shooting - during a stakeout Nishi left to visit his wife in hospital. Riddled with guilt, falling foul of the yakuza to whom he owes money and drifting into crime, Nishi is forced to take stock in this moody and compelling movie which employs minimal dialogue and an unsettling stillness punctuated by quite unexpected outbursts of stylised violence.
Kitano's melancholy screenplay was written after his own near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1994 - and in the light of his consequent reflections on life and mortality. Just as Kitano took up painting as a therapeutic activity during his convalescence, so does his paralysed partner in the film, and the paintings attributed to that character are the work of Kitano himself. This riveting, stylish and wholly assured film is accompanied by an appropriately elegiac score by Joe Hisaishi.
"The Daytrippers" (members and guests only) IFC Greg Mottola's disarming and cleverly scripted first feature, the serious comedy The Daytrippers, features the appealing Hope Davis as Eliza, a Long Island woman who believes she has the perfect marriage - until, on the morning after the family Thanksgiving dinner, she discovers a letter apparently written by her husband (Stanley Tucci) and quoting Andrew Marvell's love poems. This triggers off an intricately structured chain of unexpected events and revelations as she heads for Manhattan to learn the truth behind the letter. Accompanying her in the family stationwagon are her parents (Anne Meara and Pat McNamara), her sister (Parker Posey) and her sister's pretentious boyfriend (Liv Schreiber). There are further problems en route, as the car heater malfunctions and the boyfriend subjects the passengers to the story of his allegorical novel-in-progress about a man born with the head of a dog.
Campbell Scott, Marcia Gay Harden and Douglas McGrath also feature among the spirited cast of Mottola's keenly plotted comedy of errors which teasingly and consistently pursues unpredictable narrative twists all the way to its entertaining conclusion. Made on a minuscule budget in just 17 days, The Daytrippers is yet another welcome and enterprising endeavour which proves that size does not matter, whatever the claims vaunted by blockbusters which are altogether less substantial or memorable.
Showing on the same bill as The Daytrippers at the IFC is Martin Mahon's charming short film, Happy Birthday To Me, which was selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May. This two-hander is most agreeably played by Joan Sheehy as a woman forced to celebrate her birthday on her own, and Brendan Coyle as the neighbour whose attention she attempts to attract. The comic consequences build to a hilarious punchline.
G.W. Pabst's 1929 classic Pandora's Box, featuring Louise Brooks, receives a special screening at the IFC on Sunday afternoon at 2.10, when it will be shown in a new 35mm print with live musical accompaniment provided by the multi-instrumental quintet, Cine Chimera.
