CHRYSALIS
(Review)

Paris, 2027.
David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel, from Irreversible and Un long dimanche de fiancailles) is an operative for EuroPol who is roped back into the grind when Dimitri Nicolov (Danny The Dog’s Alain Figlarz), the criminal Hoffman has been after for a while now, resurfaces.
With a new partner in tow (played by Marie Guillard), all Hoffman has to go on is a dead, unidentified girl in the morgue, with some strange markings around her eyes.
Thus does Julien Leclercq’s Chrysalis kick off.


Now, first off, Chrysalis is one damned pretty picture.
The cinematography by Thomas Hardmeier, coupled with production design by Jean-Philippe Moreaux, gives us one of those gorgeously realized future worlds, sleek, and slickly photographed.
This also isn’t some mindless popcorn foray into science fiction. Chrysalis isn’t about snazzy, scene-stealing, and ultimately heartless CGI.
But while it is about something, it sadly falls short of actually being about something, if you know what I mean.


Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Chrysalis is that the film’s central mystery, which propels the narrative forward, is readily apparent, and yet approached by the script in a measured, oblique manner.
As soon as the dead girl’s identity (and the circumstances of her disappearance) are revealed, all the apparently disparate story elements—which include a young girl named Manon (played by Mélanie Thierry), who is apparently recovering from an accident which we see in the film’s pre-opening credits sequence—will fall into place for the alert viewer. Past this point however, Chrysalis continues to unfold as if its mystery still had any currency with its audience.
And though I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it as “plodding,” Chrysalis plays as if its 94-minute running time were significantly longer.
And because it takes so long to get to its climactic reveal, we’re left with a distinct absence of any sort of fallout from the revelation. And it’s a heavy, life-altering kind of revelation, but because the film’s spent too much time on other things (like keeping the integrity of its “mystery” intact), we get no sense of the true gravity of the situation.


And while Dupontel makes for a capable protagonist in the “tortured, guilt-ridden cop” school of movie leads, his performance also hits a snag when a massive event takes place in Hoffman’s life, and we get no real, tangible sense of the change in the character.
Again, I hesitate to use a term like “one-note,” as far as Dupontel’s performance in Chrysalis goes, but it does seem to lack some much-needed nuance, particularly in the film’s third act.
Granted, Dupontel handles the physical demands of the role well, and the bathroom beat-down with Figlarz is a highlight, but I wish I’d seen more texture, more vulnerability, in Dupontel’s Hoffman.


Like Christian Volckman’s Renaissance, the science fiction convention that Chrysalis uses as its springboard, is ultimately about a kind of immortality.
But beyond a few possibilities—delivered by the narrative in an almost dismissive manner, courtesy of The Pretender’s Patrick Bauchau—the film again doesn’t seem to significantly delve into the underlying ideas of that convention.
Then, not only is the emotional potential of the climactic reveal severely blunted by the narrative circumstances surrounding it, but the final confrontation is precipitated not by any extraordinary investigative work, but rather by mere happenstance, making Chrysalis’ ending even more vaguely dissatisfying than it already is.

However, flaws and all, I would still recommend Chrysalis, since its intentions are certainly noble, and an undeniably ridiculous amount of skill and artistry clearly went into its making.
This is very good cinematic SF, people, something we need a lot more of these days, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Leclercq comes up with next.

Parting shot: Reviews of Renaissance and Danny The Dog can be found in the Archive.

(Chrysalis OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (47)
RENAISSANCE

Paris, 2054.
Young and extremely brilliant researcher Ilona Tasuiev is abducted, and her employer, the Avalon Corporation (“Your friend. For life.”) is desperate to recover her. Enter Lt. Barthélémy Karas, a cop only too willing to bend—or break—the rules to get the job done, and you have the basic set-up for Christian Volckman’s neo-noir animated film, Renaissance.
Executed via motion capture, in the stark contrast of chiaroscuro, this is one of those gorgeously-realized sci-fi futurescapes that pulls you into its environs with startling ease. The downside of that, of course, is that the narrative has to work doubly hard to be worthy of the production’s awesome visual palette.
To be fair, there is a story here, complete with cautionary underpinnings; I’ve long believed the best sci-fi stories are the cautionary ones.
Where Renaissance fumbles a tad though is the pacing of its narrative, which is slightly uneven, making its 105-minute running time feel vaguely longish. Still, if you’re patient with your cinema, Renaissance has a nice—if not sunshiny-happy—pay-off.
Renaissance is also guilty of servicing some of the genre tropes a little too slavishly; Karas getting involved with Ilona’s sister Bislane is both painfully predictable and achieved with an off-handed and almost insulting convenience. (Though the neat reversals pulled off by that aforementioned pay-off may arguably be more than enough to balance out the script’s more clichéd moments.)

And there is the matter of Renaissance’s voice cast.
Almost always, when it comes to a foreign animated film, I will insist on watching the English-subtitled version. (With a foreign live-action film, always.)
The English dubbing on Renaissance though, is exceptional, not at all displaying the overly theatrical—and in some cases, childish—flourishes you usually find in dubbed animation.
And there are notable names here, mind: Daniel Craig, Ian Holm, Jonathan Pryce, Catherine McCormack. The talent at the other end of the mic is top-notch, certainly worthy of Renaissance’s eye-widening visuals.

Ultimately, Renaissance may be slightly flawed, but it’s nonetheless an exceptional piece of animated sci-fi that furthered the cause of stylized storytelling in modern cinema, a wave that began with Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and barreled on with the mainstream success of such entries as Sin City and 300.* (Closer to Renaissance’s animated home of course, are Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.)
Renaissance also won the Feature Film Award at Annecy 2006 and the European Fantasy Film Grand Prize at Fantasporto 2007, so that should count for something, yes?

* Fans of the digitally-created artificial environs of this brand of storytelling are advised to check out the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (review in Archive), and can also look forward to Frank Miller’s upcoming take on Will Eisner’s The Spirit, opening on Christmas Day 2008.

(Renaissance OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

CATACOMBS
(Review)

My profuse apologies to the late producer Gregg Hoffman, to whose memory this film is dedicated.

200 years ago Paris ran out of room to bury its dead.
By royal decree the remains of 7 million bodies were relocated to an abandoned limestone mine beneath the city.
Today, the most romantic city in the world sits just one hundred feet above…
… the largest mass grave in history.
The empire of the dead.

This is the woefully dire pronouncement at the head of the film, that quickly follows an eyebrow-raising “Inspired by True Events” claim (I get very dubious when a horror movie tacks that onto itself these days, but that’s a whole other story), as if these little bits weren’t actually mentioned in characters’ dialogue later on in Catacombs.
Very briefly, Catacombs follows young and nervous and rather imaginative Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon), who travels to Paris on the behest of her sister Carolyn (Alecia Moore, better known to the free world as Pink), and is swept away from a rave being held in the titular Parisian catacombs, into a not-so-frightening ordeal of the masked psycho stalker variety.

Now, please pardon the very Neanderthal piggy comment, but I’ve always thought Shannyn Sossamon was hot.
The thing is, the only film I’ve seen her in that I’ve actually enjoyed was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, while most of her other film work aren’t the sort of movies I go out of my way to watch. I did see The Sin Eater, but that was lamentably lame, and I saw bits of A Knight’s Tale on cable, but that didn’t look so great either.
So I was hoping I could add Catacombs to that list of one, but alas, I shall have to wait and hope the One Missed Call remake is the contender I’ve been waiting for.

One of the problems Catacombs has (and it has quite a number) is that the initial set-up and the eventual predicament Victoria finds herself in is played out in a rather daft manner, so much so that the climactic turn the plot takes is something that I was convinced was going on the entire time.
The apparent threat and suspense never really sets in as concrete reality, largely since Victoria never quite comes across as an actual person. There’s no identification here at all. She’s saddled with a nervous, introverted personality (with the prescribed medication to match)—her “issues,” as sister Carolyn so compassionately puts it—without any back story at all to explain why this is the case. She’s just a Nervous (and rather annoying) Nelly.
There’s only one moment in the entire film—sadly enough, when Victoria actually commits a ruthless and selfish act—that Sossamon comes across as a real person, capable of the most cruel action in the interests of self-preservation.
Every other instance is her being ragged on by Carolyn and Carolyn’s friends, or shrieking her fool head off as she’s stalked by the goat head-masked psycho.

But the fact of the matter is, the exact sequence of events that bring her to the catacombs and the terrible poopy mess she steps in, is so boneheaded, one can’t help but discover a complete lack of sympathy for the character and the predicament she finds herself in.
When she goes off to wander the labyrinth on her own, to the shouted warning from Carolyn of, “Don’t be a retard,” one can’t help but get all MST3K on Catacombs and go, “Everyone in this damned movie is a retard.”
And the whole “One must surround himself with reminders of death to fully appreciate life” jazz comes off as juvenile bubble gum pop psychology, when presented to us by Carolyn and the intellectual giant, Jean Michele (Mihai Stanescu), who also regales us with the ludicrous tale of the Cult of the Black Virgin and the goat head-masked psycho (apparently a low rent attempt to breed the AntiChrist), an account which comes complete with bizarre stutter-strobe images, presumably courtesy of Victoria’s overactive imagination.
At least, it sounded ludicrous when told to us like this.

I mean, with all that talk of “Oh, oui, people wind up missing all the time down here,” then the pervasive question of “Why the hell are we raving our heads off down here again?” glares in our faces like an irritating strobe light, a rudely inescapable reality.
It’s the 21st century “Inspired by True Events” horror movie equivalent of building a house on ancient Indian burial ground: this is simply a place you shouldn’t be in at all. Period.
If you insist on staying past the first lame “Boo,” then you deserve everything that’s coming to you. (And in Catacombs’ case, that’s certainly true of Carolyn.)

There is nothing here at all that I can commend, and even certain editing choices come off as bargain basement attempts to emulate Kevin Greutert‘s excellent work on Saw.
There’s even the climactic montage of Significant Moments and Telling Lines that, here in Catacombs, feels hideously unnecessary, as if it was there in the vain hope that it would elicit a “Well, don’t I feel like a dunce, I didn’t see that one coming at all” reaction from the less-attentive members of the audience.
In fact, a lot of Catacombs feels like underlining and overemphasis, leaving you with the urge to shout, rather irrationally, at the screen, “Yes, I got it!”
But, like some communicable disease, or an invite to a party that turns out to be a horrid stinker, or a postcard asking you to come to bloody Paris, you’ll only wish you hadn’t.

Parting shot: I don’t relish writing bad reviews. I know any movie, no matter how bad, had hundreds of people who worked on it, and many of them would probably have nothing at all to do with the flaws of the movie in the first place.
So, not only did I feel bad because Gregg Hoffman gave the horror world Saw, and he’s credited as one of the producers on Catacombs, but also because the film was co-written and co-directed by Tomm Coker, whose early comic book art I rather enjoyed.
And what’s worse, being co-writer and -director would mean he had at least half to do with why Catacombs was as awful as it was.
Apologies to you too, Tomm. I really do like your art, but Catacombs was terrible.

(Catacombs DVD cover art courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

PARIS, JE T’AIME
(Review)

An impressive array of directors are assembled for Paris, Je T’Aime, a collection of 18 five minute shorts set in and around certain sections of modern-day Paris. Ably assisted by an equally impressive ensemble, the 21 directors (3 shorts are co-directed) bring their visions of the City of Lights to the screen, and collectively produce this heartfelt cinematic portrait of life, love, and loss.
A shortlist of stand-outs would be pointless, as this film comes tantalizingly close to a clean sweep: these shorts are bittersweet and poignant, lives telescoped into a handful of minutes, sections of time that serve to illuminate entire existences.

If there are any entries that compromise that clean sweep however, they’re Vincenzo (Cube) Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine“ and Bruno Podalydes‘ “Montmartre.“
While Podalydes‘ entry—which opens the film—suffers in my eyes merely due to a personal pet peeve I have (characters talking to themselves), Natali’s effort is quite possibly the single misfire in this entire endeavour.
Though it is still pretty to look at (as are a vast majority of the film’s shorts), “Quartier de la Madeleine,“ which features Elijah Wood, just seems to be off-key, tonally all wrong. And it’s not because this is one of the more fanciful entries; Sylvain (Les Triplettes de Belleville) Chomet‘s whimsical tale of mimes and love, “Tour Eiffel,“ manages to be funny, moving, and magickal all at the same time. “Quartier de la Madeleine” just seems to be a misstep in an otherwise excellent selection of shorts. (I can live with Podalydes’ talking out loud in “Montmartre.”)

There are also a number of pleasant surprises, particularly cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle’s quirky entry, “Porte de Choisy.” Appropriately enough, like a Chinese puzzle box, “Porte de Choisy“ has another surprise within: director Barbet Schroeder as Monsieur Henny.

Without a doubt, there are some excellent shorts herein. But as art is ultimately a very subjective thing, whether or not the 18 shorts cohere into a single film rests entirely on the audience’s willingness to surrender themselves to the wizardry of the directors and their performers, and the vivid portrait they paint of a contemporary metropolis that quite possibly is not the common perception of “Paris.”

Paris, Je T’Aime is a genuinely moving collection of stories, snapshots of yearning and melancholy, of hope and regret, of loves lost, and found, tiny dramas played out under the shimmering lights of Paris in just under two hours, two hours that fly past quickly, as only the magick of love and cinema can make them.

Parting shot 1: Paris, Je T’Aime was originally intended to be made up of 20 short films, each set in a Paris arrondissement, but contributions from Christoffer Boe (“15th Arrondissement”) and Raphael Nadjari (“11th Arrondissement”) were dropped by producer Claudie Ossard; purportedly, they did not fit in with the rest of the entries.
Given my problems with “Quartier de la Madeleine,” I have to wonder what Boe and Nadjari had to say about Paris: did they have aliens blowing up the Arc de Triomphe? Or did they decide to pick up where 28 Weeks Later left off?

Parting shot 2: For the record, here’s an alphabetical list of the directors and their respective contributions:

Olivier Assayas: “Quartier des Enfants Rouges” (with Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Frederic Auburtin and Gerard Depardieu: “Quartier Latin” (with Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands; Rowlands also wrote the short’s script)
Gurinder Chadha: “Quais de Seine”
Sylvain Chomet: “Tour Eiffel”
Joel and Ethan Coen: “Tuileries” (with Steve Buscemi)
Isabel Coixet: “Bastille” (with Miranda Richardson)
Wes Craven: “Pere-Lachaise” (with Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, and Alexander Payne)
Alfonso Cuaron: “Parc Monceau” (with Nick Nolte)
Christopher Doyle: “Porte de Choisy”
Richard LaGravenese: “Pigalle” (with Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant)
Vincenzo Natali: “Quartier de la Madeleine”
Alexander Payne: “14th Arrondissement”
Bruno Podalydes: “Montmartre”
Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas: “Loin du 16eme”
Oliver Schmitz: “Place des Fetes”
Nobuhiro Suwa: “Place des Victoires” (with Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe)
Tom Tykwer: “Faubourg Saint-Denis” (with Natalie Portman)
Gus Van Sant: “Le Marais” (with Marianne Faithfull and Gaspard Ulliel)

Parting shot 3: Interestingly enough, while Payne appears in Craven’s contribution, Craven appears in an uncredited role in Natali’s short.

Parting shot 4: Co-producer Emmanuel Benhiby is currently developing a film brand, “Cities of Love,” with the next project being New York, Je T’Aime.

(Paris, Je T’Aime OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)