The Housekeeper

dir. Claude Berri

Opens Fri Aug 1 at

Harvard Exit. In The Housekeeper, a 51-year-old sound engineer (Jean-Pierre Bacri) has a brief romance with his 21-year-old housekeeper (...milie Dequenne). As the singer Peggy Lee once put it, that's all there is. You'll find nothing below or above, behind or beyond that scenario. The Housekeeper is simply and perfectly about a 51-year-old sound engineer who has a brief romance with his 21-year-old housekeeper.

The movie begins shortly after an unfaithful wife has broken the sound engineer's heart. He lives alone in a small but smart Paris apartment, and spends his day between this apartment, the music studio, and the cafes and shops of the city. Though lonely, it's hardly a bad existence; indeed, the sound engineer uses his civilization with admirable ease.

But he is a bit messy. To remedy this problem, he hires a housekeeper who turns out to be young, attractive in a sunny way, and in possession of a body that fully fills whatever small things she decides to wear while cleaning. The young woman seduces the old man; the couple then takes a vacation by the sea. The movie is perfect. CHARLES MUDEDE

Masked and Anonymous

dir. Larry Charles

Opens Fri Aug 1 at

the Guild 45th. From the beginning, Bob Dylan has made a virtue of the cryptic. Cramming his mid-'60s dreamscapes with more allusions, collisions, and characters than any literal composition could support, Dylan swept up listeners in a cyclone of intoxicating, impenetrable images. If closer inspection revealed a fair number of these images to be amphetamine-fueled exercises in whimsy, a near-equal number opened like poems, with the best of Dylan's enigmas resonating like biblical prophecy. Still, for every cavalcade of cryptic gems ("A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Visions of Johanna") there was a comparatively limited collection of received apocrypha and historical name-dropping ("Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," "Desolation Row"). Consequently, sifting through a barrage of arresting images to find the timeless diamonds is a practice known to most longtime Dylan fans, and one that will come in handy for those taking in the man's latest exercise in imagery overload, Masked and Anonymous.

Set in a mythic future America ravaged by revolutionary war, Masked concerns the planning and execution of a benefit concert headlined by the mysterious musical elder Jack Fate (Dylan), featuring a cast of characters--from carnival barkers and minstrel dandies to dark ladies and prodigal sons--who might've wandered off side two of Highway 61 Revisited, portrayed by a cast of actors--Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Angela Bassett, Jeff Bridges--who might've wandered out of an Altman film. En route to the climax, fights ensue, poetic utterances are uttered, and a whole lot of great music is made.

Dylan has been conspicuously cagey about his involvement in writing the script (attributed to Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov), but the spirit of his songs permeates virtually every frame of the film, and it's as an inspired continuation of Dylan's cryptic myth that Masked and Anonymous scores its biggest points. As a movie, it's a mess (albeit one with a knockout cast and some admirably big ideas). But as a cinematic rendering of the Bob Dylan experience, it's a beguiling, frequently intoxicating artifact. DAVID SCHMADER

Love the Hard Way

dir. Peter Sehr

Opens Fri Aug 1 at the Varsity. With the debatable exception of Barton Fink, the art of cinema has never produced a remarkable film based on the life of a writer. The reason for this is simple: Writers by nature are unremarkable people. They spend their time either writing, or reading other writers, or drinking with other writers. Love the Hard Way is about a writer, and so, by way of fate, it is a bad film.

The director, however, tried to solve the fact of the writer's life (it's boring and therefore uncinematic) by giving his particular writer an exciting life. Adrien Brody is a playboy (he has slept with over 200 women--no writer in the history of humankind has ever had that many partners), and he is a con man who runs a lucrative hotel scam with a melancholy German, a tough Puerto Rican, and a couple of tall prostitutes.

Love the Hard Way is not about a con man (whose life is exciting, and lovers numerous) however, but a writer (whose life is boring and prone to the kind of love mess that makes up a good portion of this ultimately boring movie). CHARLES MUDEDE

Scorched

dir. Gavin Grazer

Opens Fri Aug 1 at

Meridian 16. Only two of Scorched's eight main actors are responsible for its success--two actors who, unlike the other actors and even the director, know that they are not in a serious film but a very low comedy. Woody Harrelson and John Cleese are the actors I'm referring to; everything they say, every gesture their bodies make, serves only one purpose: making us laugh. The other actors in Scorched, such as Alicia Silverstone (whose body is fine but never funny), do not try to make us laugh, or at least laugh hard enough. Unfortunately, they actually act, giving us the depth and range of their characters, and attempt to transcend the limits of the low comedy.

The movie is about three bank tellers who live in a small desert town. All three are unhappy about their lives, and all three concoct separate plans to steal large sums of money from the bank. Unaware of the other plots, each sets his or her scheme in motion during the same weekend. Most of the movie is barely better than average. A low comedy. CHARLES MUDEDE