Lessons of Darkness

Black Venus (2010): C-

Simultaneously reveling in, and critiquing, sexualized racist exploitation, Black Venus generates minor friction from its two-facedness, if not nearly enough to overshadow its prime goal of punishing the audience. Writer/director Abdellatif Kechiche’s follow-up to The Secret of the Grain tells the true-life tale of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (Yahima Torres), aka the “Hottentot Venus,” a South African slave who in the early 19th century became a European sensation by starring in revolting London and Paris shows as an exotic, animalistic dark-continent freak. Kechiche opens after Saartjie’s death with a doctor – aided by a wax sculpture of the woman as well as her genitals, which are passed around in a glass jar – discussing Saartjie’s uniquely protruding vaginal “apron.” Thus from the outset Saartjie is reduced to a bizarre genetic anomaly, setting the stage for the ensuing flashback account of her life, in which Jean-Christophe Bouvet and Olivier Gourmet’s cretins force her into a life of humiliating performance, growling from a cage or on a leash at white audience members who were granted the opportunity at show’s end to touch her gigantic ass. Saartjie’s rump-shaking dance routines cannily recall modern hip-hop vixens’ moves, and Kechiche’s panoramas of grim misery have a detail-oriented meticulousness. Still, the filmmaker’s argument about xenophobic degradation is made after the first prolonged sequence of Saartjie’s act; the many subsequent ones, which bloat the runtime to an excessive 159 minutes, offer (like Torres’ one-note turn) no greater insight, instead merely bludgeoning home the same points while making the sexual nature of her disgrace more prominent, culminating with an explicit dildo-centric orgy. Kechiche’s distended staging of these events is clearly aimed at implicating us, the viewers, as complicit voyeurs responsible for the crimes, even as the director’s own role in orchestrating them for cinematic view incriminates him as well. It’s an undercurrent that, for a short time, intriguingly butts up against the story’s damnation of Saartjie’s subjugation. Yet Black Venus’ exhaustive, exhausting repetitiveness ultimately negates its critique, the film indulging in the very nastiness it derides with such gusto, and to such unnecessarily protracted lengths, that the effect is like being screamed at, about the same solitary subject, for two-and-a-half hours.

2010 New York Film Festival

 

Let Me In (2010): B

Setting aside the fact that it exists only because American moviegoers prefer not to read subtitles, Let Me In more or less faithfully duplicates 2009’s Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In, the changes made to its predecessor roughly split between the inspired and misbegotten. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves doesn’t take many chances in adapting Thomas Alfredson’s film (itself based on Jon Alvide Lindqvist’s novel), dutifully recounting the budding friendship between oft-bullied loner Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and new-girl-in-town Abby (Kick-Ass’ Chloe Grace Moretz), the latter a blood-sucker accompanied by an adult (Richard Jenkins) whose responsibility it is to procure fresh plasma for his blonde-haired charge. A few plot particulars are altered along the way, so that Owen’s mom is now a religious nut and the film begins with a flash-forward. Yet the gist remains the same, and in some cases improved upon: specifically, the inclusion of a recurring Now & Later candies motif (their name speaking to Owen and Abby’s present and future together), the replacement of a drunken character with a police officer (Elias Koteas) for a climactic bathroom scene, a canny blurring of Owen’s gender identity (he’s taunted as “little girl”) to match Abby’s uncertain sexuality, and a stunningly visceral sequence in which the camera maintains a backseat POV throughout an automotive escape gone horribly awry.

Alas, for those positive changes, there are equally objectionable ones, most of which involve tone. Ronald Reagan TV speeches supply scant political undertones, Reeves’ CG proves cartoony, and his serviceable cinematography lacks the unsettling grace of Alfredson’s, even if it often does little more than outright copy (or provide harmonizing mirror images of) its antecedent. Less welcome still, Reeves softens edges, making Abby cuter and more romantically desirable – suffice to say, the original’s infamous crotch shot is MIA – as well as somewhat moderates Owen’s anger, fury and confusion, epitomized by a third-act incident notable for its absence of a knife and, thus, the impulses that lurked behind its potential use. By rooting Abby and Owen’s, as well as Abby and her guardian’s, relationships more specifically in semi-sexual attraction and, furthermore, in sympathizing human emotion – typified by Abby’s sad gaze at Jenkins’ adult when she forces him to kill for her – Reeves’ version simplifies its central interpersonal bonds and, consequently, the deranged, unnerving atmosphere that made Alfredson’s film so haunting. All in all, it feels safer and tidier, especially since it slightly mutes the lingering suggestion that Abby’s motivations are less genuine than devious. Which, in the end, leaves Let Me In as merely an uneven trace-job of superior source material, one that gets the moves right but only sporadically the spirit as well.

Aurora (2010): C-

Removing at least an hour from Aurora, Cristi Puiu’s follow-up to 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, wouldn’t alter its plot or themes one iota, a situation that makes this three-hour portrait of stasis and emptiness a monumental slog to endure. Viorel (Puia himself) roams the Romanian countryside with, initially, no apparent motive or destination in mind; only after the better part of an hour does it become clear, through his purchase of firing pins and then a 12-gauge shotgun, that murder is his aim. While he subsequently assembles the firearm and tries out self-inflicted shot positions, his targets are others – first, a man and woman in an underground garage, and later, an elderly couple with whom he has some sort of close relationship. Puiu offers no internal life for his cruel, stone-faced protagonist and offers no telling behavior that might reflect his inner character. Rather, he’s just a hollow man in a grey, garbage-strewn environment where loners traverse train tracks, grungy apartments in need of remodeling, and other mundane locales with homicide on their minds.

At least a third of Aurora is dedicated to wholly inconsequential action that reveals nothing about anything, thereby relegating its observation of Viorel to a vacuous approximation of Jeanne Dielman’s rigorous everyday-routine-fixated gaze, not to mention one that lacks the dry social-satire wit of Lazarescu. Violence is brutish and quick in Puiu’s tale, but given the meaningless of so many of its incidents, the film fails to generate much in the way of suspense from its more menacing moments (including a clothing store spat). A superb final scene not only delivers all the plot details that had previously been withheld (although the most predictable explanation proves to be the correct one), but also the much-needed droll comedy that had generally been missing from the rest of the proceedings. Alas, it’s a closing gesture far too little too late, what with the majority of the film generating so little tension, humor or insight – into, among other rudimentarily addressed topics, the banality of evil and the clueless inefficiency of the Romanian justice system – that it often succeeds only as a form of cinematic punishment.

2010 New York Film Festival

Certified Copy (2010): A

An astonishingly multilayered portrait of a romantic relationship that doubles as a commentary on the value of reproductions – and, thus, the cinema itself – Certified Copy finds Abbas Kiarostami returning triumphantly, after years of DV experimentation, to the realm of narrative filmmaking. From conversational scenes set inside a car to discussions being interrupted by pesky cell phone calls, Kiarostami’s hallmarks remain intact, as does his gift for canny, intricate plotting. In this instance, that concerns the apparent first-time meeting between French art dealer Elle (Juliette Binoche) and English novelist James (William Shimmel), whose latest philosophical book contends that artistic copies are the equal of their originals, and that an object’s meaning is altered by one’s perception of it. Meeting the morning after James’ promotional speaking commitment in Tuscany, as well as following a talk between Elle and her young son which suggests the boy knows more about his mother than he should (and she’d like), Elle and James embark on a car ride around the scenic region. Along the way, they contemplate a range of topics – the nature of happiness (and whether we should judge its forms), the purpose of existence, and the blissful convenience of living in the moment versus the requirement of adult responsibility – which all elicit intriguingly strong emotional reactions from Elle.

During a café pit stop, the proprietor presupposes that James is Elle’s husband, an assumption she plays along with, first tentatively and then so convincingly that (à la Close Up) the line between truth and fiction begins to blur – and then altogether collapses when the couple increasingly begins quarreling like an actual married couple. During this coffee-break interlude, Elle and the shop owner’s chat wends its way through a debate on the role of women, and their men, in relationships, laying the groundwork for the ensuing, contentious bickering between Elle and James over their varying opinions on love, commitment, and what constitutes togetherness and separation (matters filtered through exchanges about Warhol, Michelangelo’s “David,” and the Mona Lisa). Its here, in the latter portions of Certified Copy, that the filmmaker tantalizingly dances with a ballerina’s grace around the issue of what’s “true,” refusing to proffer easy answers through underlining or hand-holding. Rather, his surrealistic film demands engaged reassessment at every turn as it burrows into the fissures of an affair gone awry, plumbing the depths of petty and profound grievances to expose the ways in which trust, compassion and shared dreams (symbolically addressed during a church encounter with newlyweds) can crumble not from one cataclysmic event, but by a series of internal “changes” (James’ term) to both parties.

By journey (and story’s) conclusion, what Kiarostami seems to present is nothing short of a microcosmic day-long snapshot of a union’s inception, consummation and destruction, which further functions as the Iranian auteur’s own statement regarding film’s unparalleled capacity for conveying essential truths and experiences via inherently artificial means. His tale teases with questions about the “genuine” (are Elle and James married?) even as it both puts that term up for debate (since aren’t these two actors genuinely in each other’s company?) and deems it irrelevant. It’s a bit of meta-twistiness that’s delivered with incisive Buñuel-ian wiliness, as well as a formal assuredness that’s invigorating, not least of which because it calls so little attention to itself. Though virtually every edit articulates a pent-up sentiment and/or conceptual notion, Certified Copy never indulges in the type of look-at-me showmanship typically associated with such self-conscious endeavors. Rather, its style is as elegant as it is slyly expressive, with the director generating beguiling mystery via alluring close-ups, and often partaking in extended shot-reverse shot dialogues that capture an intimate sense of convictions both connecting and clashing.

More thrilling still, his camera regularly assumes a position directly opposite the current speaker, so that they’re talking not only to their partner but to the audience, a self-aware device that (like a humorous shot of a stranger apparently scolding his wife) acknowledges film’s synthetic composition. In these images, and also striking corresponding sights of Elle and James staring reflectively at themselves in bathroom mirrors, Kiarostami evokes a monumental sense of interiority, of pathos, and of empathy, even as his very gestures highlight the action’s scripted nature. For the writer/director, Certified Copy’s role-playing and cinematographic recreations of the world and human interactions convey emotions and ideas that are just as “authentic” as those found in reality. That’s certainly the case with Shimell’s turn, which layers James’ chilly rationalism with nuanced complexities that both justify and damn his supposed matrimonial conduct. Ultimately, however, it’s in the open, inviting visage of Juliette Binoche – delivering, in the performance of a lifetime, a stunningly raw, heartfelt portrait of excitement, longing, grief, need, resentment and melancholic mourning – that the director supplies incontrovertible evidence for his dramatically gripping, intellectually acute argument in favor of the unreal cinema’s ability to get at the real.

2010 New York Film Festival

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010): A-

A beguiling fable about transition and transformation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) reconfirms Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul as one of the medium’s most mesmeric visionaries. Set in the humid, gauzy northern Thailand jungles, where fifty years earlier the indigent citizens were enlisted to stamp out communist forces, and where the real and unreal, present and past, comingle in fantastically fundamental ways, Weerasethakul’s follow-up to Syndromes and a Century revolves around Uncle Boonmee (Thnapat Saisaymar), a bee farmer who’s dying of an illness that requires his kidney to be regularly drained by a nurse. While visited by his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), Boonmee’s tropical malady summons two spirits: the ghost of his dead son Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), who after mating with a glowing-red-eyed Ghost Monkey is now himself a furry manimal; and his deceased wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), who explains that spirits don’t go to a heaven (which is “overrated”) but, instead, remain tethered to the living people they loved.

The former visitor’s condition speaks to Uncle Boonmee’s fascination with man’s intrinsic relationship to animals and nature, a bond also epitomized by a stunning sequence in which an aging princess – spurred by a young servant boy and desperate to recapture the beautiful young visage she spies in a waterfall pond reflection – gets it on with a catfish. In that sequence, as well as in Boonmee recounting his traumatic dream about “disappearing” after killing communists, the film laces its patient musings with politicized notions of guilt and silence, which also (as in the climactic sight of a monk shunning his religious robes) seem to speak to Weerasethakul’s own difficulties with his homeland’s conservative censors. Meanwhile, via Boonmee’s encounters with his wife – and, especially, in a heartbreakingly tender image of need, longing and sadness that finds the ailing man sitting up in his sick bed to embrace, and be embraced by, Huay – Weerasethakul’s film expresses the pervasive role that the past plays on both the present and the future, with the director eventually blending physical and temporal spaces during a third-act that includes appearances by characters from his prior effort.

From human to beast, old to young, and living to dead, Weerasethakul’s characters are in constant evolution, with ideas about reincarnation and safe-passage (across the Laos-Thai border, or the earthly and ethereal realm) captured through a variety of different modes that pay homage to – and thus resuscitate – disappearing Thai cinematic genres. To be sure, this is familiar terrain for the auteur, and there’s an occasional sense that the story is working out issues that were already thoroughly considered by the filmmaker’s last two masterworks. Nonetheless, his relaxed yet imposing directorial style remain breathtaking, his long, languorous, searching cinematography and enveloping sound design (a combination of natural soundscapes and ominous, otherworldly drones and shrieks) melding to create an entrancing fairy-tale mood that suggests fundamental links between – and the concurrent presence of – various states of mind and being. Like Boonmee’s eventual navigation of a nocturnal path into a subterranean cave (the stalactite roof’s mineral deposits shining like stars) and the inescapable darkness, it’s a film to descend into, an aesthetically ravishing, stunningly tender meditation on our place in this world, the next, and the many areas in-between.

2010 New York Film Festival

Enter the Void (2010): B+

Exhilarating, exasperating, inspired and redundant, Enter the Void is a film of equal parts greatness and silliness, a psychedelic head-trip that only irregularly achieves the grandeur it seeks. Expanding upon many of the ideas addressed in his prior Irreversible, Gaspar Noé’s latest is often a frustratingly shallow creation in terms of characterizations, dialogue and narrative plotting, all not-inconsiderable shortcomings that can hamper direct engagement with the action at hand. And yet the writer/director’s formal gifts are often so remarkable that they prove up to the challenge of his ambition, with his story – about an American drug dealer in Tokyo who [spoilers follow], after being killed in a deal-gone-awry, follows his sister around Tokyo as a hovering spirit – conveyed in such purely cinematic ways that the effect is stunningly transportive. To be sure, at 160 minutes (a brisker 137-minute version will receive U.S. theatrical distribution), Noé’s newest provocation is often self-indulgent and repetitive, with recurring scenes and motifs only sporadically developing the material’s underlying preoccupations. Nonetheless, Noé’s directorial flair and imaginativeness have never been more assured, and the cumulative effect of his gonzo theatrics is to situate one in a uniquely mesmerizing netherworld free from traditional boundaries between past and present, waking and sleeping, life and death.

The first segment of Noé’s wannabe-masterpiece assumes the Lady in the Lake-style first-person POV of Oscar (Nathanial Brown), who – after a brief chat with his stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) in their Tokyo apartment – puts a pipe to his lips, smokes some DMT, and has his mind overwhelmed by neon-bright hallucinations of flowering organic shapes. Throughout his saga, Noé intermittently returns to these visions of spiraling tentacles, which find visual and thematic kinship in a late aerial shot of nighttime Tokyo’s glowing city streets. The interconnectedness of life, and specifically the paths that lead from birth to childhood to adulthood to the grave (or, in this particular instance, the crematorium fires), are Noé’s underling focus as he patiently charts Oscar’s trip to a drug transaction, his death at the hands of cops secretly lying in wait, and his subsequent spectral surveillance of Linda’s grieving. These observations, however, are interrupted during Enter the Void’s middle section by a prolonged montage of memories that lay out – a tad too neatly, given that they aren’t guided by free-association links, but by a storyteller’s need to provide necessary plot info – how Oscar came to arrive at his demise in the bathroom stall of club Void (a place akin to Irreversible’s “Rectum”), curled up dead on the floor in a fetal position.

As in Irreversible, Noé’s camera is piercingly expressive, whether assuming the position of Oscar’s eyes, a third-person view just over his shoulder (in memories), or a disembodied perspective floating through walls and over city streets (in ghost form), with this last mode’s topsy-turvy cinematography conveying a world unmoored and unstable, and yet beholden to a certain sort of circular logic. Once again using 2001 as a touchstone, Noé aims to capture a sense of human evolution, or more specifically the evolution of every human life, and his outlook proves fixated on the pain of inevitable separation and the inescapable reality that (to borrow his past film’s statement-of-theme) “Time destroys everything.” Even so, there’s also modest hope to this phantasmagoric portrait. Reflecting the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he’d been reading before his death, Oscar’s spectral incarnation operates within a dream-logic state of continual destruction and, crucially, creation. And if Noé’s vision of the afterlife can sometimes be more than a tad ridiculous – climaxing, pun intended, in a distended visit to a toy-high-rise-made-real called the Love Hotel in which Oscar watches lots of people with glowing crotches have sex – it can also be aesthetically ravishing and emotionally potent, as when ghost-Oscar enters into Linda’s mind and bestows on her a disquieting dream of his resurrection.

Far less interested than before in punishing viewers with juvenile shocks to the system, here Noé casts his graphic material – including Linda’s eventual abortion, which culminates with another of the film’s many Star Child-esque images – as natural extensions of his larger concerns. Enter the Void’s dearth of three-dimensional characters and excessive duplication of thematic and narrative points can often be a drag, but Noé’s indulgences remain in tune with his outsized aspirations, and supply additional layers to his sensory feast, in which form not only takes precedence over content, but actually becomes something like the content itself. Repeatedly revisiting the traumatic car crash that began Oscar and Linda’s journeys toward their respective presents – odysseys overflowing with incestuous/Oedipal urges, friendship and romantic betrayals (a familiar root cause of trouble in Noé’s cinema), and a longing for reversion to a happier past – the film’s style is so bold and emotive that, despite its protagonist’s fundamental thinness, it gets inside Oscar and finds a universal condition of sorrow, longing and regret. That such an investigation comes equipped with hordes of diamond-colored lights, avant-garde strobe effects (over Kubrickian blank-white screens), and a trip down Linda’s fallopian tubes is merely part and parcel of this grandly screwy work, whose lofty aspirations lead to both folly and, more frequently, magnificence.

Prodigal Sons (2010): A-

A multilayered portrait of immense physical, emotional and psychological change, Kimberly Reed’s Prodigal Sons charts the filmmaker’s high school reunion homecoming to Helena, Montana, a trip made uncomfortable by the fact that Reed left the state a man (and star quarterback, no less) named Paul, and now returns years later a transgendered woman. Her documentary is thus concerned with the intricate process of self-definition via confronting the past, although it’s one focused not just on herself, but on the adopted older brother, Marc McKerrow, whom she reconnects with after a decade apart. Even more than his sister, Marc is a man scarred and haunted by his history – specifically, an automotive head injury that left him severely handicapped, robbed him of his original self and his bright future, and exacerbated his conflicted feelings over Kimberley/Paul, whom he’d both resented and secretly idolized as a boy. “I felt like Marc would have given anything to be the man I would have given anything not to be,” Kim astutely notes, and it’s clear from their interactions that the unstable Marc views her decision to become transgendered as a cruel negation of the brother he envied and loved and, even more so, as an act that, in a roundabout way, belittled his envy and love as somehow confused or misplaced.

Part fly-on-the-wall verité account, part self-analytic reflection, Reed’s film exposes familial wounds and tumult with such rawness that it occasionally approaches exploitation. Yet her unvarnished footage of Marc’s increasingly violent outbursts, as well as of her valiant struggles to make amends with both her sibling and her own masculine identity, never proves unduly manipulative; rather, Prodigal Sons proves a riveting, heart-wrenching autobiographical snapshot of people in constant states of transition, transformation and actualization. At the midway point, a bombshell is dropped [spoilers follow] – Marc, it amazingly turns out, is actually the biological grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Rather than assuaging his frustrations over his unsatisfying past, however, this newly discovered lineage instead appears to merely remind Marc of the potential greatness (also spied in his innate skill at piano-playing) that was lost to him through his accident and ensuing mental illness. With deftly employed archival clips further capturing a sense of the past’s lingering presence in both Kim and Marc’s difficult lives (as well as the continual need to reassess it), Marc emerges as the almost unbearably tragic epicenter of Reed’s moving non-fiction film, a no-gloss, false hope-free depiction of people attempting to understand, and come to terms with, their tormented selves and the equally damaged ones they love.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010): B

When it comes to chic cinematic action, Milla Jovovich may be the poor woman’s Angelina Jolie, but her Resident Evil saga continues to be one of the millennium’s only adequate B-movie franchises. In this fourth installment, the first to be helmed by creator Paul W. S. Anderson since 2002’s original, as well as the maiden chapter shot in 3D, Jovovich’s zombie-killing Alice blows up the subterranean Japanese headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation, loses her T-virus superpowers, and – along with amnesiac sidekick Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) – attempts to help a group of Los Angelinos escape a downtown high-rise prison. That ludicrous setting is in keeping with mayhem so far removed from reality (and, in most respects, the Capcom videogames that loosely inspired this series) that Afterlife doesn’t bother explaining basic plot points (it would be generous to describe the narrative as “superfluous”) or even matching one shot to the next. Instead, its prime preoccupation is reveling in outrageously gimmicky 3D imagery, most of which involves Jovovich pointing phallic firearms and running and/or leaping toward the screen as explosions propel her forward, except in the one sumptuous sequence in which Larter takes center stage to fight a hooded behemoth in rain-drenched slow-motion. Shiny CG combat of a decidedly juvenile, titillating order is the film’s sole commodity. And in that limited respect, it delivers a reasonably vigorous balance of sexiness and shoot-‘em-up carnage, all of which centers around the ogling of Jovovich, who – whether decked out in Amelia Earhart-style aero-duds or encased in an all-black jumpsuit (with matching slicked-back hair) – remains a preeminent object of carnal desire.

Jack Goes Boating (2010): C-

A character study whose two protagonists don’t resemble human beings but intricately assembled screenwriter constructions, Jack Goes Boating proves an inauspicious start to the directorial career of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars in this adaptation of Bob Glaudini’s 2007 play. Hoffman previously presented Glaudini’s work at New York City’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. Yet despite his familiarity with the material and his natural efforts to expand the story in cinematic ways, there’s still a persistent stagey quality to this tale of Manhattan limo driver Jack (Hoffman), a mopey schlub always hiding his scraggly braided hair under a wool cap, who’s afforded a rare shot at happiness when his married best friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) set him up on a date with Lucy’s funeral home sales team co-worker Connie (Amy Ryan). Given that Connie is a despondent, hesitant, slightly weird loner, she’s a perfect match for Jack, who Hoffman embodies as an awkward, heavyset man made small by his internalized personality.

Their romance is predictably clumsy and tentative, though their shared kindness, yearning for companionship, and search for “something positive” (which is Jack’s description of his beloved reggae music) slowly bridges their social-retardation chasm. Meanwhile, Clyde and Lucy serve as the story’s counterpoint, their marriage crumbling under the weight of past infidelity and the resentment, anger and self-loathing that lingers in its wake. Hoffman helms his portrait of two relationships heading in opposite directions with sensitivity and restraint, affording adequate space for the characters’ tightening or fraying bonds to develop gradually, and free of blunt expository explanations of the tumultuous feelings bubbling under the surface. Spurred by twin offhand comments by Connie, Jack sets off on dual self-improvement quests – to learn to swim so that he might take Connie boating in the summertime, and to learn to cook so that he might make her dinner – that express his urgent desire for togetherness and reciprocated warmth, and the lengths he’s willing to go to achieve those ends by winning over his new girlfriend.

Alas, from Jack’s visualization routines, habit of clearing his throat when he’s nervous, and swim lessons under Clyde’s tutelage, to Connie’s multiple, questionable claims of being sexually assaulted – which, along with her third-act request for a pseudo-rape bedroom fantasy, speak to the pleasure and pain of male-female relations – Jack Goes Boating carries an overpowering scent of writerly affectation. Habitually staring off into nothing with looks of misery and fear tattooed on their faces, and accompanied by a soundtrack insistently placed in the action’s foreground, Jack and Connie don’t resemble recognizable flesh-and-blood individuals but merely amalgams of italicized tics, hang-ups and gestures designed to represent various themes. Both freak out, fumble and brood in such meaningfully quirky ways that they never resonate as real people. Their courtship is one about isolated strangers finding comfort and joy in a discovered soulmate, but they consistently come off as unbelievable fictitious creations – brought to life by Ryan and, especially, Hoffman via mannered quiet voices, cautious comportment and pained scrunched-up expressions – conveniently gravitating into each other’s idiosyncratic arms.

Which is a shame, since in Clyde and Lucy, Hoffman’s behind-the-camera debut provides a polar-opposite view of romance that’s rooted in compellingly credible human experience. To be sure, Glaudini’s scripting of the spouses’ tense rapport also carries with it a strong theatrical aroma, regardless of the fact that Hoffman branches his story out to include more locations than were featured in the original play. Nonetheless, in Clyde’s efforts to deal with an imagination run wild thanks to Lucy’s unfaithfulness, and in Lucy’s increasing disdain for her ambition-challenged husband, Jack Goes Boating delivers glimpses of drama rooted in recognizable emotional and psychological reality, charting the way relationships mutate and disintegrate with a reasonably astute eye. Unfortunately, the finale’s hash and alcohol-fueled roundelay of miserabilist histrionics conclusively exposes the mechanical story’s stagey roots. Yet more pressing still, in its moderately rending investigation of Clyde and Lucy’s tattered love, the film suggests it would have been better off repositioning its supporting figures to lead-character status.

Never Let Me Go (2010): C+

Never Let Me Go has a premise at odds with itself, a conflicted condition that can’t be salvaged by a trio of fine performances. Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed 2005 novel concerns the romantically prickly relationship in 1970s England of three friends – Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and the boy they both covet, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) – who all live and study at Hailsham boarding school, a rural institution where the children are carefully monitored for artistic abilities and physical fitness. Strange clues abound as to the truth of their circumstances, though it’s not long before a new teacher (Sally Hawkins) informs them of their fundamental nature [spoilers inevitably follow]: they are clones designed to grow into early middle age, at which time they’ll be harvested for their organs (during a series of procedures politely known as “donations”) until they die (euphemistically dubbed “completion”).

Romanek’s drama follows the three through higher learning and then out into the confounding outside world, where, after Kathy and Ruth’s jealous clash over Tommy, they more or less quietly accept their destinies, though not before Kathy and Tommy (embodied with an understated, nuanced sense of longing and discomfort by Mulligan and Garfield) make a late-inning attempt for a deferral on the start of their donation duty. This one stab at prolonging life, however, comes too late, and in too meek a fashion, for a story that depicts its central players as soulful humans no different from their “originals,” yet then asks us to accept that such clones (on an individual or collective level) would never think to rebel against their fate. Scripted by Alex Garland with little of the complex, ambiguous character interiority that defined Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go posits Kathy, Ruth and Tommy as capable of love, fear, spite, warmth and existential rage, and then cancels out that depiction by also casting them as docile sheep so thoroughly conditioned that, even upon learning their future, they exert no free will. Blade Runner’s replicants they most certainly are not.

Of course, Ishiguro and Romanek mean for the kids’ unique reality to be so rigidly engrained that acquiescence to being “donors” is the only logical course of action. Stand-ins for whatever oppressed minorities one might choose, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy – because their conditioning has negated only the impulse for freedom (not any other emotion or urge) – come off as merely devices in a rickety allegory. Toss in an oblique, thinly sketched portrait of a citizenry perfectly comfortable with slaughtering genetic replicas for medical care – epitomized by a scene in which Ruth is allowed to die on the operating table by doctors who treat her as so much meat – and the film’s conceit begins to crumble under the weight of unpersuasive details. To their credit, Mulligan and Garfield, especially in a late scene of crushing disappointment, generate heartfelt pathos despite their protagonists’ generally unbelievable responses to their prescribed paths. Yet Romanek’s superficially beautiful, often haunting direction is undercut by frequent cutaways to heavy-handed symbols (a beached boat, a flying dove), and his reasonably nimble storytelling eventually gives way to a final scene that, with a stunning lack of grace, bluntly articulates the material’s readily apparent thematic message.