Tools
dir. Christoffer Boe
Opens Fri Oct 8.
Reconstruction is not a movie but a meta-movie, a movie about movie making. And it doesn't have a story but a meta-story, a story about storytelling. Despite having these arty attributes, however, it's not an art film--meaning, it doesn't go on forever and have dense philosophical exchanges that only a few of us can hope (or care) to decipher. Nor is Reconstruction an ugly picture; it has, instead, the sort of images you might find in a European fashion magazine. The locations where the meta-movie's action takes place (a hotel, a restaurant, bar, and subway platform) are much like the settings for a celebrity photo shoot; and the main characters in the movie look like supermodels--a ruggedly handsome protagonist (who is a photographer), and two beautiful women (one of whom is the photographer's girlfriend, the other his lover--or, closer yet, the object of his desire).
While traveling on a subway, the photographer chances to see a glamorous (in both senses of the word) woman. He jumps off the train, follows the woman through the streets of Copenhagen, meets her, seduces her, sleeps with her, wakes up the next morning in a hotel room, and returns home later that day to find that his apartment has vanished and no one remembers him. We have entered a dream. But who's the dreamer? There is one other important character in the film, a novelist who is married to the glamorous woman. It is very possible that we are in his dream world. The novelist is old, his wife is young, and the photographer is even younger. This may be his nightmare or fantasy or both. The puzzle is never solved, but Reconstruction (which could have been called Deconstruction) does very well without a solution, as it has two basic elements that make any movie (meta or otherwise) worth watching: attractive actors and a big city. CHARLES MUDEDE
Stranger Personals
Nicotina
dir. Hugo Rodriguez
Plays Fri-Thurs Oct 8-14 at the Varsity.
Madonna's husband Guy Ritchie is a British director whose two biggest films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, were pegged as Tarantino-inspired gangster films; the type where playful banter and self-conscious camerawork and editing overshadowed weak, generic storylines. I mention this because even though the new Mexican film Nicotina has been described as Tarantinoesque, it's more of a Guy Ritchie imitation than a Tarantino gangster film, or maybe just a Tarantino film twice-removed.
Nicotina opens with split-screen conversations between people setting up a diamond heist, which immediately clues you in that this is a movie based on other movies and not on real life. I mean, when was the last time you read about a diamond heist? Does this seem like the kind of crime that low-level criminals would try to get away with? Only in the movies, where diamonds symbolize immediate and luxurious wealth. Sexy young star Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) plays a computer hacker breaking into a Swiss bank account, which has something to do with the heist, but who is also obsessed with his neighbor to the point where he has planted web cameras in her apartment and spies on her. When she recognizes what he's up to she confronts him, which leads to a mix-up in his computer discs, one of which he hands off to the two bantering criminals who are to hand it off to the Russian gangster. Then things really go wrong.
Director Hugo Rodriguez edits the movie with an energy that nearly makes up for its lack of originality. What he can't quite cover up is a nasty view of women. The victim of the voyeurism turns out to be a gold-digging slut looking for a man with money who can help her get into the London Philharmonic. When the action shifts to a barbershop, the barber's wife shows herself to be a greedy shrew. The only likeable female character is the pharmacist's wife, who is praised for wanting to leave her awful husband after he's become moody because he quit smoking. Then again, I'm probably thinking too much about a movie that was meant to be disposable entertainment. ANDY SPLETZER
Rosenstrasse
dir. Margaretha von Trotta
Opens Fri Oct 8.
Based on actual protests at the Rosenstrasse detention center during World War II, the long, lugubrious Rosenstrasse tells the story of a little Jewish-German girl and her savior, an Aryan princess. Of course, this suspect plot has been recycled by any number of Holocaust narratives, so there are a couple of twists. First, the Aryan princess--a baroness, technically--is married to a Jew imprisoned at Rosenstrasse (meaning he, in turn, was saved from the death camps by the fact of his intermarriage). To confuse matters further, the child eventually grows up, moves to New York City, and gives birth to a snappy dresser named Hannah (Maria Schrader). As the film opens, Hannah gets sick of her mother's refusal to speak of her traumatic girlhood and tromps off to Berlin to find the aged, but rather more chatty, baroness.
Thus, the story of the little girl (an irritating Svea Lohde) and her blond salvation (Katja Riemann) is told entirely in flashback. The exposition flows plentifully in Hannah's letters and the baroness' conversations, and director Margaretha von Trotta keeps unmediated action to a minimum. When a straightforward scene does break through the voiceover morass (for example, the scene dramatizing the historic detention center protest) its effectiveness is undercut by melodramatic zooms and soap-opera pacing. This film fails as entertainment, and as education it's completely muddled. If you really want to learn about the Rosenstrasse protests, try a book. There's a copy of Nathan Stoltzfus' Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany at the Seattle Public Library. ANNIE WAGNER
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