Don’t Look Up (2021) [R] ****

An edited film review by Vince Mancini for UPROXX on Dec. 18, 2021.

Don’t Look Up, from Vice / The Big Short director Adam McKay, is a well-intended satire, about how American politicians and tech titans wouldn’t be able to stop being venal and self-interested long enough to save themselves, even if there was a comet heading straight for Earth. Think Armageddon in the style of Veep.

While McKay, who began his career as a director of goofy comedies, like The Other Guys and Stepbrothers, still knows how to structure a joke, his sensibility often feels too dated for a cutting satire of modern media. Don’t Look Up is a strong idea (with story credit to McKay and journalist David Sirota), and lots of the individual jokes work, but at times it gets so caught up trying to make fun of so many different things that it seems to lack an internal logic. Satire in and of itself isn’t quite a story.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral student with severe art bangs who discovers a massive comet (a planet killer, as it’s described later) late one night while singing along to Wu-Tang during her shift manning the Subaru telescope. Dibiasky, who feels very much like a middle-aged white man’s idea of cool hipster, eventually alerts her Michigan State Univ. doctoral thesis advisor, Dr. Randall Mindy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a dowdy beard and enjoyably dorky Midwestern accent. Together they make the rounds, trying first to inform the government, then the public, all in an attempt to get someone to do something about it.

Their tour takes them first to Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which a title card informs us is a real office that actually exists. Rob Morgan plays Oglethorpe, an enjoyably idiosyncratic character who probably deserved more screen time than he gets.

McKay pulled this same sort of fourth-wall-breaking shtick in Vice and The Big Short, and I do enjoy it, within reason. It makes sense to be clear that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is a real thing, because it sounds like something this kind of movie would invent (the Subaru Telescope is apparently real too, maybe that could’ve used a title card). The bigger issue in Don’t Look Up is that there’s a kind of dissonance between its extremely on-the-nose elements (aping the font and color schemes of MAGA hats and posters) and its unnecessarily fictionalized ones. In a scene in which a social media consultant discusses the engagement Mindy and Dibiasky received during a morning show segment, real social media platforms are all bowdlerized as VroomVroom, Friendlink, Rabble, and Diddly, in a way that feels almost deferentially courtly. Why not just say Facebook and Twitter? McKay doesn’t seem like a guy afraid of offending Mark Zuckerberg.

And again, those site names don’t really land as jokes, partly because they feel like parodies of sites from five or 10 years ago, not ones five or 10 years from now. For a director who clearly loves shooting montages of memes and tweets, McKay doesn’t seem to have that solid a grasp of what makes a great tweet or meme (in fairness he does do clickbait headline parody quite well).

By contrast, the hosts of the morning show on which Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky appear are played enjoyably, by Tyler Perry, who for all his corniness as a writer/director is still a pretty damned solid comedic actor, and Cate Blanchett, in a set of unnaturally white veneers and over-the-top TV makeup that somehow still make her look hot. She plays a sort of fake-dumb-blonde, cosmopolitan rich girl getting her bag on TV, as a satire of Laura Ingraham, Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelly, Stacey Dash, Martha MacCallum or Kayleigh McEnany.

Meryl Streep is similarly great as President Orlean (a callback to her playing Susan Orlean in Adaptation?), a sort of careerist hybrid Trump/Kamala more worried about the midterm elections than she is about the impending apocalypse. Her chief of staff is her dopey son, played wonderfully by Jonah Hill in what feels like a combination of his Inside SoCal character from SNL (Dad, it’s just a kicker) and his own clean and rad and powerful emails.

Just when it seems like Dibiasky and Dr. Mindy have finally gotten the president to act, she gets sidetracked by Peter Isherwell, a robotic tech tycoon played by Mark Rylance in another solid turn, as a character who’s clearly a riff on Jeff Bezos, with shades of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. The whole story turns on this shift, from the president’s decision to go with Isherwell’s pie-in-the-sky plan to not just deflect the comet but get rich from it, rather than follow the recommendations of scientists. It’s the defining shift of the movie, and also kind of where it falls apart.

President Orlean becomes not just a careerist, but a pseudo-climate denier, with her new slogan, Don’t Look Up urging supporters to ignore the reality of the killer comet. It’s easy to see what point McKay is trying to say here, about leaders putting profits ahead of saving the planet and treating a global crisis as just another geopolitical game, but plot-wise it doesn’t quite track. Ariana Grande, playing a fictionalized version of herself, has a come-to-Jesus moment and tries to help get the public to care, releasing a song about how she wishes she’d listened to the scientists. Aside from her character being vaguely sketched, science is real feels like the kind of yard sign liberalism McKay is normally above. More broadly, individual characters’ motivations and story arcs get short shrift in favor of trying to lampoon as many things as possible.

The classic Hollywood idea was that a global crisis would force an end to our petty squabbling, as seen in movies like Armageddon and Independence Day. This was probably based on the general cultural takeaway from World War II, that when the chips were down, we’d eventually come together and kill the fascists. (the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We will not go quietly into the night!')

Now that we’ve seen plenty of crises that seem to have the opposite effect, factionalizing the populace, polarizing our experience of objective reality and seemingly driving everyone insane, it has manifested in our fiction. Children of Men and The Leftovers saw its characters slide into magical thinking, hostility, and cultism in response to societal upheaval, borne out in real life with things like QAnon and people getting really into crystals.

Don’t Look Up clearly wants to be the comedic, more overtly satirical The Leftovers, but its satire is too backward looking. And whereas The Leftovers was always character-first, Don’t Look Up feels more like a series of sketches. Lots of those sketches are reasonably funny, but they don’t always maintain a consistent logic. [Mancini’s rating: 2.5 stars out of 4]

Blogger's comment: While Meryl Streep did a reasonably good job as President Orlean, I would have cast Alec Baldwin doing his famous blonde comb-over and gotten Brooklyn Decker or Alice Eve to play his well-endowed blonde daughter. But that's just me.

Labels: comedy, drama, Netflix, satire, sci-fi, tragedy
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=50, viewers=57)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=80)
Netflix 

Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life, 1970) [PG] ****

NOTE: While there are no actual spoilers in this review, certain elements of the plot of Les choses de la vie have to be discussed in order to make sense of the film, and that discussion borders on spoilers.

On one level, Les choses de la vie is a fairly standard story of that staple of French film, and life in general, the ménage à trois, although the film is rather deceptive about this particular element. The film opens with allusions to a catastrophic event, before finding a couple, Pierre Berard (Michel Piccoli) and Hélène Haltig (Romy Schneider), in bed. As the film progresses, it's implied that they are married, and perhaps married for quite a while, although there is definitely still passion in their relationship. Only later is it revealed that Hélène is not Pierre's wife, but rather his mistress, although given the state of Pierre's marriage to Catherine (Lea Massari), Hélène may be Pierre's more constant companion.

On the structural level, Les choses de la vie is an intriguing viewing experience, since it uses the element of a devastating car crash to avoid using linear time. There are brief seconds inserted into the film that depict Pierre driving at high speed through the French countryside on the way to a meeting in Rennes, 350km southwest of Paris, and we get the distinct impression that his journey will not end well. Director Claude Sautet uses these interruptions in the narrative to offer several vignettes that show us the dysfunction in the two relationships, leaving us with the question of whether Pierre will go back to Catherine, or divorce her and marry Hélène. In fact, this question is uppermost in Pierre's mind as he journeys toward Rennes and, at one point, he even pens a letter to Hélène, the contents of which we cannot know, except indirectly by listening to Pierre. The ultimate outcome of the horrifying auto accident is left until the film's closing moments, although the sort segments shown earlier in the film leave us with little doubt.

While this film is often cited as being Sautet's first film to really connect with both audiences and critics, it's just one of three films often cited as a comeback for Romy Schneider, along with La piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969) and Cesar et Rosalie (1972) in a tribute to her successful career. Schneider, Piccoli and Massari all give perfectly fine, natural, believable performances. Some critics have identified elements of the film that are superfluous, such as the family flashbacks on the Île de Ré, or the couple with the overheated vehicle that Pierre picks up. However I found them necessary to the film. The idyllic scenes of the Berard family, Pierre, Catherine and their two children, sailing in the Atlantic offshore of the Île de Ré, show that Pierre could have had a perfectly serene, uncomplicated life had he not been a driven architect-engineer, continually dissatisfied with his situation. And the couple with the overheated car are later shown in a taxi, driving by the scene of the wreck and being silently grateful that they were not in the car.

Personally, it’s hard for me to watch films that I know are going to end in tragedy, as Les choses de la vie does. Also, there are subtleties of language in a film like this about relationships that probably do not translate well, so reading the subtitles I am sure I missed something important. The film itself has not aged especially well. Most of the characters smoke cigarettes, and Pierre is a chain smoker. Also, Michel Piccoli (1925-2020) was 44 and Romy Schneider (1938-1982) was 31 when the film was shot in the summer of 1969, so the two are thirteen years apart, although Piccoli looks like he is at least twenty years older than Schneider. This caused me to wonder what she could possibly see in him, which made it hard for me to believe in them as a romantic couple.

Music in films is important to me, and one of the most beautiful things about this film is the haunting melody La Chanson d'Hélène, music by Philippe Sarde, lyrics by Jean-Loup Dabadie and sung by Romy Schneider. Here is the link to the song on YouTube, as part of the soundtrack. LINK

And, finally, Les choses de la vie was remade in 1994 as Intersection, with Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich. The general consensus is that it is not as good as the original. IMDb link

Labels: drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 76/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=TBD, viewers=86)
Blu-ray
Blu-ray review

Cesar & Rosalie (César et Rosalie) (1972) [R] ****

 An edited film review by Roger Ebert, September 27, 1973.

Someone once said that Yves Montand seemed born to play doomed European leftwing intellectuals. And so he has, most memorably in Z and La Guerre est Finie, and against the type in State of Siege. But nothing in those films could possibly prepare us for the loud, gentle, awkward, jealous, childlike, impulsive Montand of Claude Sautet’s Cesar & Rosalie.

The movie tells a love story of sorts, or a love-hate story, and even if it does lose its way toward the end it presents not one but two unusually good performances: by Montand, as Cesar, a wealthy, scrap-metal dealer with international connections, and by Romy Schneider as Rosalie, the woman who loves him sometimes and lives with him sometimes, but not always at the same sometimes.

It’s the sort of thing the French, with their appreciation for the awesome complexities of a simple thing like love, do especially well. American movies tend to treat love as a vast magic spell; if you’re in love nothing else matters and you’re surrounded by your own special miracle, etc. And you’re also young, of course. Movies about the loves of older people - Montand’s age, for example - tend to be comedies revolving about absurd domestic situations.

Not here. Sautet gives us a complicated situation and contrives to elevate it to the level of the completely impossible. Rosalie is presented as a character who was in love with David (Sami Frey), but married Antoine when David disappeared without explanation. As the movie opens she has divorced Antoine and is with Cesar, but not living with him. David, the first, younger lover returns and Cesar immediately becomes insanely jealous. He uses all the tricks he can muster to scare his rival off, but succeeds only in driving Rosalie into David’s arms.

But then, well, the passion of jealousy can be attractive at times, and Cesar is an attractive man, all bluff and growl and wounded masculinity. So Rosalie wavers, and then Cesar plays a trump card by buying the childhood vacation home she loved so much. So then she goes back with Cesar, but then she’s lonely and depressed. It’s a classic reversal on a standard romantic theme: Rosalie can’t love the man she’s with, and can’t be with the man she loves. In desperation, Cesar appeals to David to move in with them in the summer home. And after a fashion, he agrees. The two men are caught in a cruel trap. They both love Rosalie, and she loves both of them, but the situation is so psychologically contorted that there’s no happiness anywhere. And it’s even more labyrinthine because, wouldn’t you know, the two men begin to like each other.

All of this sounds more like musical chairs than a Gaelic comedy, but Sautet pulls off a nice erotic juggling act that almost works, all except for the very ending of the film, which seems not only unlikely but perverse. We don’t much care, though, because we’ve had a good time and enjoyed, as we enjoy few things, the way Romy Schneider can make a half-shy smile into the suggestion of unimaginable carnal possibilities.

ENDING SCENE SPOILER: Rosalie and her daughter Catherine left the summer home while David and Cesar were out on a boat fishing. She moved to Grenoble, and Cesar and David stopped looking for her and began living together. Then, after some time, Rosalie drove up to their home in a taxi, got out and the two men saw her out of a window. End of film. [Ebert’s rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Labels: comedy, drama, French-language,romance, Romy Schneider
IMDb 74/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=71, viewers=82)
Blu-ray
Kanopy
Roger Ebert’s review

 

 

La piscine (The swimming pool) (1969) [R] ****

SYNOPSIS (INCLUDES SPOILERS):

It’s the heat of summer in the south of France. In the foothills overlooking the resort town of Saint-Tropez and the blue Mediterranean sits a villa occupied by Marianne (Romy Schneider) and her current lover Jean-Paul Leroy (Alain Delon), house-sitting for some friends who have gone to India.

The centerpiece of the property, which is surrounded by vineyards, is a swimming pool (la piscine in French) which is where most of the action takes place. Jean-Paul and Marianne have known each other for over two years. They are both writers but Marianne is the more successful; after Jean-Paul’s latest failed effort he has given up serious writing and gone into advertising.

They are lying beside the pool, engaged in foreplay, when they hear the phone ring and their housekeeper says it’s for Marianne. It turns out to be Harry Lannier (Maurice Ronet), an old friend, and on impulse, Marianne invites Harry to come and stay with them for a few days.

Harry is a highly successful music producer who drives a brand new and very expensive 1968 Maserati Ghibli. He’s been a friend of Jean-Paul’s since the latter was a 17-year-old, and he was Marianne’s lover four years earlier. If we use the actors’ actual ages as a guide to their characters’ ages, Ronet (b. 1927), Delon (b. 1935), Schneider (b. 1938), at the time of filming in the summer of 1968 Harry was 41, Jean-Paul was 32 and Marianne was 30. Harry arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin, b. 1946) in tow, a daughter that neither Jean-Paul nor Marianne had known about.

As Pénélope tells Jean-Paul, she had never met Harry; her mother had said he was dead, and now that she’s all grown up he shows up and wants to be a part of her life, know everything about her and take her everywhere. He admits to fawning over her and getting a thrill when people think she is his girlfriend. Clearly his relationship with her borders on the incestuous. She also tells Jean-Paul that Harry doesn’t really like him and thinks he has no talent. She observes that Harry really doesn’t like anyone, but wants everyone to adore him.

As the drama unfolds, Harry clearly wants to rekindle his relationship with Marianne, and Jean-Paul is determined to seduce Pénélope while protecting his relationship with Marianne.

Harry continually taunts Jean-Paul, reminding him that he was Marianne’s lover, that he is more successful in business, and that he has a desirable young daughter. Meanwhile, Marianne watches what is happening, and as Jean-Paul’s interest in Pénélope becomes more obvious, Marianne retaliates by becoming more playful and affectionate with Harry.

Finally, one afternoon, Marianne tells them she needs to go shopping in Saint-Tropez and asks Harry to take her in his Maserati. After they leave, Jean-Paul invites Pénélope to go swimming with him at a nearby beach on the French Riviera. By the time Jean-Paul and Pénélope return, it is dark, Pénélope’s hair is wet and matted, she is holding her bikini and is wearing Jean-Paul’s jacket. It is obvious they have had sex. The dinner, which Marianne and Harry had prepared, is tense. At the end of the meal Harry tells Marianne that he and Pénélope will be leaving in the morning, that if he left her with Jean-Paul and Marianne, her mother, with whom Pénélope lives in Lausanne, would kill him.

Harry then goes out, to see his friend Fred in Saint-Tropez before he leaves. After he leaves, Jean-Paul tells Marianne he also will be leaving in the next day or two. Marianne assumes it is to go to Lausanne to see Pénélope.

Harry comes back drunk and runs his Maserati into the partially-open villa gate. Then he begins an argument with Jean-Paul beside the pool. He tells him that it is over between Jean-Paul and Pénélope and that he’s taking her away in the morning. Harry taunts Jean-Paul about his relationship with Marianne, calls Jean-Paul a spoiled brat who always had to be handled delicately, with kid gloves.

Jean-Paul accuses Harry of being jealous. Harry swings at him, misses and falls into the pool. He reaches out to Jean-Paul for help and Jean-Paul half pulls him out, then lets him fall back into the pool. Harry, cold and drunk with a stomach cramp, cannot get out on his own and Jean-Paul pushes him back in every time he tries to get out. Then Jean-Paul takes his hand, pushes his head under water and drowns him. Then he undresses Harry, leaving him in just his undershorts, as though he stripped on purpose to go for a swim, hides his shirt and pants, rolls Harry back into the pool, goes to his room for a dry shirt and pants and leaves them folded on a table beside the pool.

The police inspector Leveque from Marseilles suspects Harry’s death wasn’t an accident, because Harry had worn his expensive non-waterproof watch in the pool and because Harry’s folded up clothes had nothing in the pockets and no sweat in the fabric, as though they had not been worn. The questions he asks make Marianne suspect it wasn’t an accident and that Jean-Paul had drowned him. He claims that if someone had pushed Harry into the pool, drowned him, then changed his clothes, the result would be the same. By the time the inspector leaves after his second visit, Marianne is sure Jean-Paul drowned Harry.

When Jean-Paul tells Marianne that he is driving Pénélope back to Lausanne, Marianne realizes that Pénélope has replaced her and that her love affair with Jean-Paul is over. She begins to see Jean-Paul in a new light, as the murderer of her former lover and the seducer of his daughter. And then Jean-Paul, believing Marianne has found Harry’s clothes in the woodpile, tells her the story of what happened, and Marianne makes the decision to protect Jean-Paul, to be complicit in Harry’s death, and to send Pénélope home.

And at the Nice airport, Pénélope tells Marianne she doesn’t believe anything that Jean-Paul said, and when she asks Marianne how her father died, Marianne says he drowned, and it was an accident.

The inspector knows what really happened, that Marianne is protecting Jean-Paul, and that if she ever has any regrets or changes her mind, she should come to him and he will reopen the case. In the final scene Marianne plans to leave Jean-Paul, but inexplicably, at the last minute she changes her mind and decides to stay with him.

La piscine, co-written and directed by Jacques Deray, is a masterpiece of flirtation, jealousy, lust and seduction, male competition and a sophisticated amoral view of love in 1960s France. It was the fourth most popular film in France in 1969, partially because former real-life lovers Delon and Schneider were reuniting, bringing a palpable erotic chemistry to their performances, and partially because Birkin’s lover, Serge Gainsbourg, had publicly warned Delon and Ronet in the tabloids to stay away from her.

Although Pénélope has the smallest role, she is the key to this story. While Harry and Jean-Paul are ostensibly friends, the basis of their relationship is hatred, and it is Pénélope who brings that hatred to the surface. In fact, La piscine can be viewed as a take on the Greek Oedipus myth: Jean-Paul (the son) kills Harry (the father) so he can seduce Harry’s daughter.

Alain Delon’s image was solidified by La piscine; Schneider’s was liberated. Though she had been working steadily, she had not yet distanced herself from the wholesome Sissi Trilogy that had made her internationally famous as a child actress in the 1950s. But her performance as Marianne not only announced her arrival as a performer of sensuality and maturity, but led to a career-revitalizing, award-winning, five-film partnership with director Claude Sautet, beginning with 1970’s The Things of Life.

THE CRITERION 2021 BLU-RAY RELEASE:

Taking advantage of its four lead actors' multilingual abilities, La piscine was shot simultaneously in French and English near Saint-Tropez, France, from August to October 1968. The Criterion blu-ray disc offers both the French version and a slightly shorter English-language version (The Swimming Pool: “First Love Never Dies), which had been released outside of France in 1969. For it, director Jacques Deray made his edits based on performances, rather than doing a shot-by-shot re-creation of the French version.

The English-language version contains a brief 20-second alternate ending showing the police inspector and uniformed officers returning to the villa and getting out of their police vehicle. The assumption is that they are there to arrest Jean-Paul, or perhaps both Jean-Paul and Marianne. Deray and his producers added the brief final shot to La piscine upon its release in Spain in 1969, to appease Franco-era censors upset by its morally ambiguous original ending, and the same shot concludes the English-language version of the film.

The blu-ray disc also contains Fifty Years Later, a 2019 half-hour documentary made by Agnès Vincent-Deray, widow of director Jacques Deray, on the occasion of the film's fiftieth anniversary. It features interviews with actors Alain Delon and Jane Birkin as well as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean-Emmanuel Conil, who wrote the novel on which the screenplay was based.

It also contains a 20-minute interview with scholar Nick Rees-Roberts on the film’s cinematic and aesthetic legacy conducted by the Criterion in which he traces the influence of La piscine on the worlds of film and fashion in the half century since its release.

Finally, there is archival production and promotional footage, and trailers in French and English, and the package has a liner notes booklet with an essay by film critic Jessica Kiang.

Labels: crime, drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 71/100
MetaScore (critics=tbd, viewers=tbd)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=78)
Blu-ray
Amazon
Jessica Kiang essay
Wikipedia
1968 Maserati Ghibli