Film Reviews

THE ILLUSIONIST When I first encountered it earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Neil Burger’s The Illusionist struck me as a torpid romantic mystery — not half as clever as it thought it was — about a brilliant stage magician (Edward Norton) in fin-de-siècle Vienna whose love for a lissome countess (Jessica Biel) runs him afoul of the politically ambitious crown prince (Rufus Sewell). After screening the movie again more recently, I still wouldn’t deem it a success — not least because the beautiful but vapid Biel remains as unconvincing as a Viennese countess now as she did then. But The Illusionist goes down easier the second time around, in large part because Burger’s tiresome fixation on whether or not the magician, Eisenheim, is endowed with supernatural powers falls away on a repeat viewing, making it easier to appreciate the movie’s elegant cinematic sleight of hand. As with any good magic show, the fun of a picture like this lies in knowing that we’re being tricked and trying to figure out how the trick works, rather than having the rug pulled out from under us all of a sudden at the end. Had Burger himself realized this sooner, The Illusionist (which was adapted from a short story by Martin Dressler author Steven Millhauser) might have made for a jaunty historical thriller à la Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time. As things stand, the movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who’s not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti as the chief inspector assigned to investigate Eisenheim even as he sees in him something of himself — a man of small standing, physically and socially, who through sheer determination has reached a place of privilege and influence in an empire teetering on the verge of collapse. This is a character worthy of Robert Musil. (Century City 15; NuWilshire) (Scott Foundas)

 GO KABHI ALVIDA NAA KEHNA (NEVER SAY GOODBYE) Karan Johar’s Bollywood melodrama Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) contains set pieces so spine-chillingly effective that people may still be talking about them 20 years from now: The most astonishing of these is a lavish up-tempo musical number in which veteran leading man Amitabh Bachchan and his dashing son Abhishek, clad in matching outfits of black and white and saturated red and clearly enjoying each other’s company, strut their stuff amid spangled chorus girls. The sequence is executed with blissful smoothness, as are many others, although this surprisingly dark drama about the collapse of two marriages isn’t as exhilarating overall as Johar’s last major production, Nikhil Advani’s Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003). The normally winning and ebullient Shah Rukh Khan bravely turns his superstar energy inward as an embittered, injured former soccer star who finds a soul mate of sorts in the sullen Maya (Rani Mukherjee), who never allows her doting husband (Abhishek Bachchan) to forget that marrying him was “the biggest compromise of her life.” These soreheads seem so grimly determined to chip away at their well-meaning mates that we never develop a rooting interest in their relationship. That leaves the movie to be dominated pretty effortlessly by the Bachchans, with Abhishek turning in a powerfully anguished performance and Amitabh kicking up his heels as an aging playboy who relishes his own naughtiness. And as a director of melodramatic peak moments, Karan Johar has no peer: He stages a chance encounter on a New York street between an adulterous husband and the two women in his life with the slow-motion virtuosity of a soap-opera De Palma. (Naz 8; Fallbrook 7; One Colorado) (David Chute)

LUNACY At once the most visceral and cerebral of Czech absurdists, Jan Svankmajer weighs in again with a horror-movie treatise on how not to run a lunatic asylum and, by implication, a society. Drawn from two stories by Edgar Allan Poe and philosophically under the influence of the Marquis de Sade — a mad ecstatic if ever there was — Lunacy tracks the adventures of Jean Berlot (played by Pavel Liska, who, so far as I could see from this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival, props up Czech national cinema), a Candide-like naif with nightmares who is “rescued” by a Marquis (the excellent Jan Tríska) with a hyena laugh and dragged through therapies that range from illusory freedom to extreme coercion. Much zealous depravity ensues, Catholicism takes a drubbing and the sets, upsetting the always fragile balance between real and surreal in a Svankmajer film, crawl with the director’s signature animated raw meat. As always, Svankmajer prefers inventive blasphemy (in his book, as in Sade’s, an honorable form of truth telling) to orthodoxy. Point taken, but compared to the focus and vital spontaneity of Svankmajer’s 2004 masterpiece, Little Otik, Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch. (Nuart) (Ella Taylor)

MATERIAL GIRLS was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at www.laweekly.com/film. (Citywide)