Film
And now for something completely different
Published 12 March 2007
Experimental cinema meets the mainstream, with mixed results
The Good German (15)
dir: Steven Soderbergh
Inland Empire (15)
dir: David Lynch
Paying homage is an act of respect, though you wouldn't know it from The Good German, in which the director Steven Soderbergh visits a kind of vandalism upon the memory of 1940s cinema. The production used only equipment available in 1945, when the film is set. Whether this extended to off-screen activities, with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett forced to lunch on Spam or flick through old copies of Photoplay between takes, remains unclear. But Soderbergh stays true to the lenses, cameras and stylistic devices used in that era. What hasn't been reproduced is the briskness and bruised poetry of Casablanca, The Third Man and the other classics that haunt every frame of The Good German.
The arrival in Berlin of Jake Geismer (Clooney) coincides with the meeting of Truman, Churchill and Stalin in nearby Potsdam, where the landscape of postwar Europe is to be mapped out. Lovesick Jake has other things on his mind. He's being driven around town by Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire), an obnoxious upstart with the black market at his fingertips and the sultry Lena (Blanchett) at his beck and call.
But Jake and Lena have a history together, and soon old wounds are being reopened and old-fashioned dialogue is being exchanged. When Jake suggests hot-footing it out of the city, Lena adopts her vampiest Marlene Dietrich voice and hisses: "You can never really get out of Berlin." She's right, of course, because there was no easyJet in those days.
As issues of culpability and victimhood surface, Soderbergh makes unnecessarily heavy weather of Jake and Lena's quandaries. Paul Verhoeven's recent Black Book showed that a film about moral ambiguity during wartime need not renege on its duties as entertainment, but The Good German handles the same subject in a clumsier fashion.
Nor does the introduction of sex and violence into this 1940s artifice serve any purpose beyond reminding you how inventive the film-makers of 60 years ago had to be to appear squeaky-clean. But at least Soderbergh has tried to marry the experimental to the mainstream, even if on this occasion it's a union that calls for a quickie divorce.
Experimental cinema is in better health in David Lynch's Inland Empire. Lucid storytelling, sumptuous photography and a basic relationship between cause and effect are just some of the elements missing from this three-hour sensory assault. And I mean that in a good way.
Laura Dern is impressively fraught as Nikki Grace, an actress who is cast in a remake of a Polish film that was aborted after the lead actors were killed. In place of that old horror standby, the house built on an Indian burial ground, Lynch gives us a film conceived in the shadow of murder and possessed by the spirits of the dead. Nikki doesn't stay Nikki for long - she is gradually consumed by her role, and by the actress in whose footsteps she is following, until her identity becomes as equivocal as everything else in the picture.
Lynch pulls enough berserk conceits out of the hat to make everything right, or rather brilliantly wrong, in his world. I loved the Alice in Wonderland-style rules that pepper Nikki's turbulent voyage of discovery: at one point she presses a lit cigarette against a silk negligee and peeks through the burn-hole to observe the goings-on in a parallel reality. As good as anything the director has done is the moment when we discover the truth about a ghostly interloper on the set; the penny drops, along with the temperature in the cinema.
Repeatedly the film returns to a drab room with three people wearing rabbit heads, one of whom is doing the ironing. They're still in that room at the end of the picture, and one of them is still pressing the same shirt. What can it all mean? Perhaps the message is that if you want your ironing done, don't ask a rabbit, because it'll take all day. It's as good a guess as any.
Pick of the week
Dreamgirls (12A)
dir: Bill Condon
Jennifer Hudson deservedly won an Oscar for her fizzy turn in this girl-group musical.
Hot Fuzz (15)
dir: Edgar Wright
Carnage on the village green in a dotty, good-hearted cop comedy.
The Good Shepherd (15)
dir: Robert De Niro
Taut thriller with fine performances from Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Michael Gambon.
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