They talk. They speak as only the French can speak, as if it is not enough for a concept to be difficult, it must be impenetrable. No two real people in the history of mankind have ever spoken like this, save perhaps for some of Catherine Breillat’s friends that even she gets bored by. “Your words are inept reproaches, they say, and I bless the day I was made immune to you and all your kind.” After a few days of epigrams, they suddenly and sullenly have sex, and make a mess of the sheets.
Some events in this movie cannot be hinted at in a family newspaper. Objects emerge to the light of day that would distinguish target practice in a Bangkok sex show. There are moments when you wish they’d lighten up a little by bringing in the guy who bites off chicken heads.
Of course we are expected to respond on a visceral level to the movie’s dirge about the crimes of men against women, which, it must be said, are hard to keep in mind given the crimes of The Woman against The Man, and the transgressions committed by The Director against Us. The poor guy is just as much a prop here as men usually are in porn films. He is played by Rocco Siffredi, an Italian porn star. The Woman is played by Amira Casar, who is completely nude most of the time, although the opening titles inform us that a body double will be playing her close-ups in the more action-packed scenes. “It’s not her body,” the titles explain, “it’s an extension of a fictional character.” Tell that to the double.
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth. There are scenes here where Breillat deliberately disgusts us, not because we are disgusted by the natural life functions of women, as she implies, but simply because The Woman does things that would make any reasonable Man, or Woman, for that matter, throw up.
Annapolis
(DIRECTED BY JUSTIN LIN; STARRING JAMES FRANCO, TYRESE GIBSON; 2006)
Here I am at Sundance 2006. Four years ago I sat in the Park City Library and saw a film named Better Luck Tomorrow by a young man named Justin Lin, and I joined in the cheers. This was a risky, original film by a brilliant new director, who told the story of a group of Asian kids from affluent families in Orange County, who backed into a life of crime with their eyes wide open.
Now it is Sundance again, but I must pause to review Annapolis, which is opening in the nation’s multiplexes. Let the young directors at Sundance 2006 set aside their glowing reviews and gaze with sad eyes upon this movie, for it is a cautionary lesson. It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt clichés and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.
The movie stars James Franco as Jake Huard, a working-class kid who works as a riveter in a Chesapeake Bay shipyard and gazes in yearning across the waters to the U.S. Naval Academy, which his dead mother always wanted him to attend. His father, Bill (Brian Goodman), opposes the idea: He thinks his kid is too hotheaded to stick it out. But Jake is accepted for an unlikely last-minute opening, and the movie is the story of his plebe year.
That year is the present time, I guess, since Jake is referred to as a member of the class that will graduate in 2008. That means that the Navy is presumably fighting a war somewhere or other in this old world of ours, although there is not a single word about it in the movie. The plebes seem mostly engaged in memorizing the longitude and latitude of Annapolis to avoid doing push-ups.
There is a subplot involving Jake’s fat African-American roommate, nicknamed Twins (Vicellous Shannon). There is much suspense over whether Twins can complete the obstacle course in less than five minutes by the end of the year. If I had a year to train under a brutal Marine drill sergeant with his boot up my butt, I could complete the goddamn obstacle course in under five minutes, and so could Queen Latifah.
The drill sergeant is Lt. Cole (Tyrese Gibson), who is a combat-veteran Marine on loan to the academy. Where he saw combat is never mentioned, even when he returns to it at the end of the movie. I’ve got my money on Iraq. But this movie is not about war. It is about boxing.
Yes, Annapolis takes the subject of a young man training to be a Navy officer in a time of war, and focuses its entire plot on whether he can win the “Brigades,” which is the academy-wide boxing championship held every spring. It switches from one set of clichés to another in the middle of the film, without missing a single misstep. Because Jake has an attitude and because Cole doubts his ability to lead men, they become enemies, and everything points toward the big match where Jake and Cole will be able to hammer each other in the ring.
I forgot to mention that Jake was an amateur fighter before he entered the academy. His father thought he was a loser at that, too. He tells the old man he’s boxing in the finals, but of course the old man doesn’t attend. Or could it possibly be that the father, let’s say, does attend, but arrives late, and sees the fight, and then his eyes meet the eyes of his son, who is able to spot him immediately in that vast crowd? And does the father give him that curt little nod that means “I was wrong, son, and you have the right stuff?” Surely a movie made in 2006 would not recycle the Parent Arriving Late and Giving Little Nod of Recognition Scene? Surely a director who made Better Luck Tomorrow would have nothing to do with such an ancient wheeze, which is not only off the shelf, but off the shelf at the resale store?
Yes, the Navy is at war, and it all comes down to a boxing match. Oh, and a big romance with another of Jake’s commanding officers, the cute Ali (Jordana Brewster), who is twenty-five in real life and looks about nineteen in the movie. I have not been to Annapolis, but I think plebes and officers are not supposed to fraternize, kiss, and/or dance and do who knows what else with each other, in spite of the fact that they Meet Cute after he thinks she is a hooker (ho, ho). Ali and the academy’s boxing coach (Chi McBride) help train Jake for his big bout.
Here is a movie with dialogue such as:
“You just don’t get it, do you, Huard?”
“I don’t need advice from you.”
Or …
“You aren’t good enough.”
“I’ve heard that all my life.”
Is there a little store in Westwood that sells dialogue like this on rubber stamps? There is only one character in the movie who comes alive and whose dialogue is worth being heard. That is the fat kid, Twins. His story is infinitely more touching than Jake’s; he comes from a small Southern town that gave him a parade before he went off to the academy, and if he flunks out, he can’t face the folks at home. When Jake’s other roommates move out because they don’t want to bunk with a loser, Twins stays. Why? His reason may not make audiences in Arkansas and Mississippi very happy, but at least it has the quality of sounding as if a human being might say it out loud.
B
Baise-Moi
(DIRECTED BY VIRGINIE DESPENTES AND CORALIE TRIN THI; STARRING RAFFAELA ANDERSON, KAREN BACH; 2001)
Baise-Moi is (a) a violent and pornographic film from France about two women, one a rape victim, the other a prostitute, who prowl the countryside murdering men. Or, Baise-Moi is (b) an attempt to subvert sexism in the movies by turning the tables and allowing the women to do more or less what men have been doing for years—while making a direct connection between sex and guns, rather than the sublimated connection in most violent movies.
I ask this question because I do not know the answer. Certainly most ordinary moviegoers will despise this movie—or would, if they went to see it, which is unlikely. It alternates between graphic, explicit sex scenes, and murder scenes of brutal cruelty. You recoil from what’s on the screen. Later, you ask what the filmmakers had in mind. They are French, and so we know some kind of ideology and rationalization must lurk beneath the blood and semen.