Movie Reviews: Indestructible, Reprise, Water Lillies

GO  REPRISENorwegian director Joachim Trier’s dazzlingly kinetic tale of two aspiring novelists is bounded by fantasies of what might have become of the pair after the publication of their first books. But the entire film plays out in the past-, present- and future-conditional tense — a bold experiment in narrative and style that in less passionate or skilled hands might well have ended up as the self-indulgent wank so many po-mo novice filmmakers, drunk on technique and existential bombast, have to get off their chests before they give up or get down to business. In one sense, that’s precisely what Reprise is about. The tension between alienation and belonging, between ambition and pretension, the chasm between dreams and reality, plays out in the divergent stories of the two writers and their friends and lovers, equal-opportunity admirers of punk bands, cult novelists and Henry James. Six months after the publication of his novel, fragile, sensitive Phillip (played by Anderson Danielsen Lie, a doctor and musician) is hospitalized for an emotional breakdown, calling into question his brilliant future and his relationship with his girfriend Kari (model and musician Viktoria Winge). Meanwhile, Phillip’s seemingly less talented best friend, Erik (advertising copywriter Espen Klouman Høiner), a goofball with a perennial slack grin on his face, wins sudden success with his own ridiculously named opus, and weighs leaving his own supportive lover. Trier, who’s distantly related to that other adventurous Trier (Lars von), doesn’t want you “making sense” of the characters’ ups and downs for a long time, if ever. But Reprise — a masculine story whose women come off best — is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic and strangely beautiful riff on being young and growing up in a broken world. (Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)

PICK GO  ROMAN DE GAREClaude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman may be one of the silliest love songs in the canon of French fluff, but 42 years on, it gets a beguiling makeover in this new soufflé from the director, who seizes the day both to trade on and shake off his enduring reputation as France’s reigning romantic airhead. Roman de Gare — which loosely translates as “airport novel” and was written and directed under the pseudonym Hervé Picard — is stuffed with fakers who run the gamut from hapless to charming to vaguely sinister. At the center is an unlikely couple: a celebrity-mad provincial neurotic (the appealing Audrey Dana), who’s either a hairdresser or a hooker, and a pug-faced stranger (Delicatessen star Dominique Pinon), who’s either a serial killer, a teacher on the run from his wife and kids or the ghostwriter for a famous novelist (played by Fanny Ardant). Slyly bookmarking the early audience hit that also got him slimed by elite critics, Lelouch shoots his characters through rainy car windows or chugging back Burgundy on a fancy yacht. But this goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge, littered with winks in the direction of that other murder mystery, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1947 Quai des Orfèvres, whose police inspector happened to be a certain Monsieur Picard. (The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)

GO  TURN THE RIVERKailey (Famke Janssen) is getting on 40, living in an upstate limbo, driving to NYC for clandestine meetings with the 12-year-old son that her ex-stepmom tries to keep from her. She’s undesirable because she lives off poker and trolling money games at Rip Torn’s underlit, underpopulated pool hall (its drabness accentuated by a sludgy 16mm transfer). When a woman fills a traditionally male role, you’re bound to find strange frictions — scenes around the pool table are fraught as each pocketed ball impacts the egos involved, the tactile threat of imperiled manhood a constant undertone. While buying the freshly exfoliated Janssen as a beer-battered hard case requires suspended disbelief, her low-key treatment beats the ostentatious frowsing-down that’s usually counterfeited for range when a beautiful woman plays “against type.” Writer-director by Chris Eigeman, one of America’s finest comic actors (best showcased in Whit Stillman’s films), seems aware of the risk that his film runs of drifting into the untenable, and so he painstakingly anchors it with double knots of character development, weaving in a network of supporting parts and a real sense of how people support or subvert one another in their screwed-up relationships. Turn the River can’t weather the ante-upping into pathos when Kailey desperately reasserts her privilege of motherhood — but the sense of storytelling intelligence is undeniable. (Regent Showcase) (Nick Pinkerton)

GO  UNSETTLED Punctuating his legacy with a major question mark, then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon presided over the forced evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza and the West Bank in 2005. Having encouraged such settlements throughout his long military and political career, the increasing instability and bloodshed they caused presented Sharon with an extremely tough call. For the settlers, it was the ultimate betrayal, and even those who agreed with the move acknowledged that it was fraught. Unsettled, Adam Hootnick’s burningly smart documentary, delves into this national crisis. Though it was quickly done and left no body count, Hootnick deftly illustrates how the evacuation cut to the heart of the question of Israeli identity: Limning a spectrum of Israeli youth — settlers, soldiers, activists — he records the supremely emotional showdown that resulted when soldiers forced fellow Jews from their homes. “Are you a real Jew or a robot Jew?” one young settler demands of a soldier. “If you don’t cry, you’re not a Jew!” an older woman admonishes. Hootnick focuses solely on the inter-Israeli situation and does not delve into the Arab/Palestinian side of this complicated equation. The reasoned arguments of these motivated, eloquent young people and the passionate but substantive confrontations in the streets are strangely heartwarming; it’s a level of engagement that has proven sadly elusive for most conflicted countries, including this one. (Music Hall) (Michelle Orange)