Movie Reviews: Bangkok Dangerous, Babylon A.D., Mister Foe

GO  A GIRL CUT IN TWO Claude Chabrol, who should soon be shooting his 70th feature, is at once wildly prolific and utterly faithful — at least to the conventions of the commercial thriller. Darkly droll, his A Girl Cut in Two updates the scandalous case of the celebrated fin de siècle architect Stanford White — shot dead by the jealous young millionaire who married White’s teenage mistress, a showgirl. An old-fashioned cineaste, Chabrol came to the story by way of its 1955 Hollywood version, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, though he transposes it to contemporary Lyons. Charles, a successful novelist and practiced libertine (played with seasoned suavity by François Berléand), vies with Paul, the young, unstable heir to a pharmaceutical fortune (given a memorable foppish swagger by Benoît Magimel), for the favors of an innocent TV weather girl, Gabrielle (wide-eyed, luscious Ludivine Sagnier). Confident yet vulnerable, Gabrielle falls for the (much) older guy and, in love for the first time, allows herself to be debauched by this veteran roué. Then, after a nasty breakup and an ensuing breakdown, on the rebound, she marries the preening young fool — thus effectively incinerating them all. A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work, and although directed for mordant comedy, the spectacle of a naive, lower-middle-class woman’s misadventures in a nest of wealthy vipers is initially unsettling and ultimately gut-wrenching. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)

LOVE AND HONOR At 76, Japanese writer-director Yôji Yamada is still best known in his homeland for a one-time Guinness Book record-holding series of four-dozen films (the Tora-san series), all with the same plot about a traveling salesman who is unlucky in love. That resolute consistency carries over to Love and Honor, the third leg in Yamada’s melodramatic samurai trilogy (following the Oscar-nominated The Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade). Here again are the familiar feudal class themes and low-ranking samurai protagonist: Newly appointed to be a food tester for a local lord, Shinnojo (Takuya Kimura) eats an out-of-season shellfish and goes blind. He falls into suicidal despair, until a chance to exact revenge upon a head clerk who has bedded his wife leads to the trilogy’s third mano-a-mano showdown. If you’ve seen the others, you’ll know not to expect Zatôichi action in this blind man’s duel; Yamada’s refined Merchant-Ivory approach to the Edo era (slow pace, genteel storytelling, restraint) produces more yawning than fawning. At least the guy’s dependable. (Music Hall; One Colorado) (Aaron Hillis)

Aliceleo Cinema

A Girl Cut in Two

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GO  MISTER FOE Young Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell) is convinced that his stepmother (Claire Forlani) accelerated her upward trajectory from Dad’s secretary to Dad’s wife by offing his mom, but the coroner says it was suicide. An unswayed Hallam channels his grief and loathing into spying on couples going at it, Dad (Ciarán Hinds) and Stepmom primarily. After sleeping with the latter, he runs off to Glasgow, finds a doppelgänger for his deceased parent in Kate (Sophia Myles), and sets about spying on her in the bedroom. These are unlikely components for a comedy — which Mister Foe, against the odds, definitely is. Co-writer/director David Mackenzie has jokingly claimed this as the capstone of his “sex trilogy” (2003’s mostly celebrated Young Adam and 2005’s mostly ignored Asylum preceded it), a threesome (har) of films extrapolating a single idea: In Mackenzie’s world, wholesome sex is a possibility for other people but never for the (anti-)hero, whose couplings are always the sublimated expression of something else. What makes Mister Foe such unlikely fun, though, is Bell’s accomplished smart-ass routine and Mackenzie’s blithe attitude toward taboos. Every possible voyeuristic/incestuous kink gets a workout. “I like creepy guys,” Kate declares, but she doesn’t know the half of it. (The Landmark) (Vadim Rizov)

GO  PING PONG PLAYA Documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu takes a breather from chronicling heavy-duty outsider artists (In the Realms of the Unreal) and extremists (Protagonist) to try her hand at a popcorn send-up of identity politics you can take the kids to — and it’s not half-bad. Burdened with a perfect older brother and marooned in disdain for his ping-pong-obsessed suburban Chinese-American family, Chris “C-Dub” Wang (a character worked up from a sportswear commercial by Ping Pong Playa’s production accountant/co-writer Jimmy Tsai, who also plays him with dumb-ass brio) succumbs to a severe case of homeboy envy, talking ghetto and shooting baskets with little kids while stewing in a dead-end job and blaming his failure to make the NBA on his short stature. Chris is a good, if rather too long-running, joke, and it’s fun that Yu and Tsai, who know their Asian-American bourgeoisie through and through, skewer the hypersensitivity of minorities with the same acuity that they take down white condescension. Frantically paced, littered with cute kids, and overstuffed with split screens and a rap score, Ping Pong Playa angles a little too hard for tween attention, but there’s no resisting the movie’s antic affability or its irreverence, even with Chris’ unavoidable progression toward the mature appreciation of his roots. (Mann Chinese 6; Mann Glendale Exchange) (Ella Taylor)