Living & Arts

Filmgoing in Philly: Week Two

BY ALEX ISRAEL , ISAAC HAN , and ALEX HO

In print | April 9, 2009

Rudo y Cursi

Playing this past weekend at the Philly Film Festival was the Mexican comedy “Rudo y Cursi” directed by Carlos Cuarón. The film is about two brothers who get caught up in the world of professional soccer and consequently have their lives turned upside-down by the temptations and corruptions that come with fame. The brothers go through very different experiences but still end up equally corrupted. Tato, nicknamed Cursi, (Gael Garcia Bernal) gets signed to a wealthy team and is treated to a life of luxury and fame. Meanwhile, Beto (Diego Luna), nicknamed Rudo for his temper, gets signed to a poor team and has to live a hard life to keep playing soccer. Interestingly, in spite of their differences, each brother gains and then loses fame — Cursi through living life too extravagantly and Rudo through an addiction to gambling.

As much as “Rudo y Cursi” is about the pitfalls of fame, it is equally about how fame affects the relationship between the brothers. Tato is well-respected, gets paid well and lives in luxury, while Beto is barely respected, gets paid only when he plays and lives in relative poverty. Although the two brothers’ experiences with fame are very similar, Beto is still treated with less respect because he is a goalie while Tato is a striker, the stars in soccer because they score goals. This jealously breaks them apart, and the brothers can only reconcile once their fame has gone.

The differences in the way that the two are treated based on the positions they play on the soccer pitch indicates the hierarchy of respect embedded in the sport, in which, much like in American football, the kicker is less-respected than the quarterback even though both are essential to the team. The film uses this hierarchy in soccer culture to engage in larger human issues of morals and ethics. Throughout the film, the agent and narrator, Batuta, (Guillermo Francella) offers caveats about soccer that double as metaphors and allegories for life.

Because of this moralistic teaching, the film is at once enlightening and tedious. The moralistic observations are thought-provoking touches, but they come up too often in the course of the movie. Although I concede that many great movies, such as “Almost Famous” and “Amelie,” thrive on narration as a storytelling device, my issue with this movie is that there is too much narration. I don’t need to hear a soccer allegory every five minutes. I need to see scenes that allow me to experience the trials and tribulations of the film’s characters, not scenes that explicitly underline them. In one scene, Tato is making love to his girlfriend, and the narration tells a cute story about how handling a soccer ball is like handling a woman. Now, this story may be briefly entertaining, but it ultimately is just smoke and mirrors, as it has nothing to do with the conclusion of the film that fame corrupts people. The narration is a flaw that doesn’t allow the viewer the room to fully experience the events of the film on their own terms and come to their own conclusions about the meaning of the story.

“Rudo y Cursi” certainly has its humorous moments and makes for a reasonably pleasurable viewing experience. But be aware of the many morals that are thrown around in the film in an attempt to make the story more meaningful than it should be.

By Issac Han

I Sell the Dead

The opening credits of Glenn McQuaid’s raucous, hilarious, violent and frightening film “I Sell the Dead,” which had its East Coast premiere at the Philadelphia Film Festival last week, tell you just about everything you need to know about the film. The credits are artfully macabre and feature forbidding woods that twine into blood vessels, thoughtful skeletons and laughing ghouls. The images are a play on the memento mori sensibility that pervades this pitch-black comedy about two grave robbers whose alternately humorous and horrifying exploits provide the film’s narrative.

The film’s framing device is a narrative by one of the grave robbers, Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan of “Lost” and “Lord of the Rings”) who is visited in prison the night before he is due to be executed by one Father Duffy (“Hellboy”’s Ron Perlman), a priest and occultist who shows a keen interest in Arthur’s history. Before long, the grave robber’s stories are flowing as freely as the whiskey that Father Duffy brings with him, and the fun of the film begins.

The center of the film is the relationship between Arthur and his partner/mentor Willy Grimes (Larry Fessenden). Fessenden and Monaghan have an easygoing comedic chemistry that keeps even the most macabre scenes grounded in some sort of reality. The blend of high Gothic horror (in the spirit of Shelley and Stoker) and easygoing humor is what keeps the film, as well as our intrepid heroes, lively and fun, even in the face of some truly incredible obstacles. Those obstacles include zombies, vampires and a very nasty rival gang known as the House of Murphy, which consists of Bulger (Alisdair Stewart), a man whose teeth have been replaced by those of a dog; Valentine Kelly (Heather Bullock), a woman who hides her burn-scarred face behind a mask and only reveals it to those she is about to kill; Cornelius Murphy (John Speredakos), who as a child killed and devoured his pet rabbit to keep it away from his father; and Samuel Murphy, the father, a figure so terrifying that we never even see his face. (Well, until the end of the film … but if I told you about that it would give away two really wonderful twists, and I refuse to give away twists.)

The Murphy gang is a group of vicious thugs, and their unpleasant habits, ironically enough, provide some of the funniest moments in the film. The scene in which Arthur recounts the rabbit-eating story comes with a series of flashbacks to the event in question, and I can tell you that you haven’t really experienced black comedy until you’ve laughed at the sight of an angelic child holding a dismembered bunny whose blood is smeared all over his face. The reveal of Valentine’s face also mines comic gold; instead of falling into the Two-Face trap and showing the audience some laughably fake burn scars, McQuaid leaves Valentine’s face to our imaginations, instead allowing Arthur and Willie’s increasingly panicked expressions (and Fessenden and Monaghan’s fantastic comic timing) to hint at the utter horror they are witnessing in a way that sent the entire audience into fits of hilarity.

I’ve come back again to Fessenden and Monaghan’s chemistry and comic timing, because that chemistry is what really sells the film. In the end, what made the film memorable wasn’t the gothic horror or the zombies (although both those elements were skillfully executed); it was Monaghan’s charismatic swagger, Fessenden’s grumpy scowl, and the way that those elements came together to create a comic twosome the likes of which I haven’t seen for quite some time.

By Alex Israel

Summer Hours

“Summer Hours,” which had but one measly screening at the Philadelphia Film Festival, is both a departure and a fitting addition to the trajectory of Olivier Assayas’ film career. Like the globetrotting “Irma Vep,” “demonlover,” “Clean,” and “Boarding Gate,” Assayas’ latest film can be considered yet another treatise on globalization and the cheapening of human relations in a capitalist existence. What “Summer Hours” adds to the mix is a tempered appreciation for the ailing legacy of family and past tradition.

Never leaving Assayas’ native France, “Summer Hours” observes three 40-something siblings as they decide what to do with the majestic country home of their recently deceased mother Hélène (a vibrant Edith Scob) as well as her vast collection of art nouveau pieces. The film opens with the last of the extended family’s annual summer get-togethers at Hélène’s home. Hugs and smiles are generous in this bucolic paradise, but it quickly becomes clear that the members of this reunion are all living very separate lives. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is the only one of the three who remains in Paris with a family. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), the free spirit of the three, is a designer who splits her time between the U.S. and Japan. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) is a businessman preparing his family for a permanent move to China for his work.

Like any good French filmmaker (Assayas once wrote for the “Cahiers du Cinema” as Truffaut and Godard once did), Assayas places the meaning of the film not in any emphatic plot points, but in between the lines, so to speak. Frédéric, Adrienne and Jérémie’s gift to their mother — a cell phone — immediately illuminates the generational gap that is at the core of the film. Later, when Frédéric and Adrienne revisit their mother’s house to prepare its various pieces of art for transfer to a museum, a long tracking shot boldly follows the former housekeeper Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), up-until-now a background figure, as she returns to the house unannounced and takes one of the vases out of its bubble wrap to house the flowers that she’s brought. The virtuosic sequence breathlessly (and wordlessly) posits that art is best appreciated as a part of one’s daily life rather than embalmed in exhibition. And the point is made all the more poignant when Frédéric and his wife later visit the same vase, antiseptically displayed in a museum.

Far less heady than, say, “demonlover”’s ambition (or perhaps pretension) to bridge the disparity between cinema and new media, “Summer Hours” feels downright old-fashioned. There’s little self-reflexivity or hip homage to be seen here. The film is unabashedly ingenuous and even has moments where its characters softly break down into tears and the picture fades out. In an interview with “Time Out London,” Assayas said that the film “has taken me into areas that are very interesting for me. I was in a cinema, debating with the audience in a provincial French town. Those people didn’t want to know about cinema, about modernity, about narrative or whatever — they wanted to discuss the issues in the film and how the characters react or don’t react … All of a sudden, I’m exactly where I’ve always wanted to be as a director: having a straightforward relationship with an audience who have reacted directly to the story I’m telling.”

It’s no wonder that Assayas finds his audience wanting to continue the conversation of his film. “Summer Hours” is largely made up of everyday talk — talk between the siblings, between Hélène and Frédéric, between Frédéric and his own daughter. It’s candid talk that anyone can relate to as they speak to those universal familial bonds. Reflecting real life, the dialogue of the film is often insipid. A conversation at the reunion about the economy doesn’t get more illuminating than “America benefits the most.” Most interesting are the layers of cordiality, formality and pragmatism that color the dialogue in a scene, after the funeral, when the siblings must decide whether to keep or to sell their mother’s house. Both Adrienne and Jérémie manage after some courtesy gum chewing to acknowledge that they are living their own lives and the house no longer matters to them.

The film’s amusing ending, a coda to its opening, returns to the country house, this time with Frédéric’s daughter, and is a way for “Summer Hours” to come to terms with the loss of generational history, like the cycle of seasons. “Summer Hours” is a quiet piece — deceptively simple, but as thought provoking and inquisitive as any of Assayas’ recent films.

By Alex Ho