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The Shallow End
Devices and desires in Swimming Pool, plus The Girl From Paris
Inevitably, Sandrine does splendidly, modernizing ancient machinery and selling goat cheese over the Internet. Just as inevitably, these two stubbornly strong wills face off and then grow closer, notwithstanding a bitterly cold winter and the lingering attentions of Sandrine’s Gallic-gorgeous but weak-kneed ex (Frédéric Pierrot). For all its deceptively simple naturalism, though, The Girl From Paris is as briskly unsentimental as it is humane about people and nature — it offers us a Hobbesian but redeemable world. The movie is filled with lovely images: Serrault, so suave and urbane when last we saw him in Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, here grizzled and meditatively milking goats; Sandrine gazing in wonder from astride her horse as a hang glider gracefully circles the majestic Rhône Alps. The Girl From Paris may not have half the smooth technique of Swimming Pool, but it has 10 times the heart and soul.
Preemptive Shriek
“Everybody’s a critic,” the British writer Clive James once wrote, “but some of us write it down.” More and more of us, it seems. Only last week, the ubiquitous Arianna Huffington went online to pronounce Legally Blonde 2, in which Reese Witherspoon mounts a grassroots campaign for I-don’t-know-what, “a clarion call to movement building.” No doubt the masses are amassing as we speak. Meanwhile, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Marvin Hier, not content with anointing himself gatekeeper to Hollywood for Jewish-themed films, has begun issuing warning labels on films that have not been completed, let alone released. In an op-ed co-written for the Sunday L.A. Times with the historian Harold Brackman, Hier cautions Mel Gibson that his upcoming movie about the Passion of Christ (which Hier assumes, sight unseen, is actually about blaming the Jews for killing Jesus) is likely to inflame anti-Semitic feeling “at this tinder-box moment in our new century.” From the hardly fresh news that Gibson’s father is a Holocaust-denying wacko, Hier blithely deduces that his son holds the same noxious views. For all I know, he may — by many accounts Gibson cleaves to some pretty loony right-wing politics of his own. But the time to cry anti-Semitism — maybe — is not now but when the movie comes out and hangs itself. In the meantime, rather than play critic-in-waiting, Hier might reassure himself with what most critics already know, which is that when Gibson goes behind the camera to make a movie about a braveheart of history, it is likely to emerge as a celebration of his own personal holy trinity — himself, Himself and HIMSELF.
—E.T.
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