Why? I wanted to ask the filmmakers. Why? You have a terrific cast and the wit to start out well. Why surrender and sell out? Isn’t it a better bet, and even better for your careers, to make a whole movie that’s smart and funny, instead of showing off for fifteen minutes and then descending into cynicism and stupidity? Why not make a movie you can show to the friends you admire, instead of to a test audience scraped from the bottom of the IQ barrel?
Monica Potter is radiant as Amanda, an art restorer at the Museum of Modern Art. She has been betrayed by a boyfriend, and vows to focus on her job. “I love art better than real life,” she says, because the people in paintings “stay in love forever.” True of the Grecian urn, perhaps, if not of Bosch, but never mind; her latest challenge is to restore a priceless Titian, which the curator hauls into the room with his fingers all over the paint, banging it against the doorway.
Moving out from her faithless boyfriend, she finds a $500-a-month room (i.e., closet) in a vast luxury apartment occupied by “the last four nonsmoking models in Manhattan” (Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, Sarah O’Hare, and Tomiko Fraser). And then she falls head over heels in love with a neighbor, Jim (Prinze), who walks a big dog that knocks her over and sets up a conversation in which she says all of the wrong things. That’s the dialogue I thought was so funny.
In a film with more confidence, the comedy would continue to be based on their relationship. This one prefers to recycle aged clichés. She thinks she sees him club someone to death. We know he didn’t, because—well, because (a) it happens in silhouette, so the movie is hiding something, and (b) Freddie Prinze is not going to play a real club-murderer, not in a movie with a cute dog. Idiot Plot devices prevent either one of them from saying the two or three words that would clear up the misunderstanding. Meanwhile, the exhausted screenwriters haul in the Russian Mafia and other sinister characters in order to make this movie as similar as possible to countless other brain-dead productions.
As my smile faded and I realized the first fifteen minutes were bait-and-switch, my restless mind sought elsewhere for employment. I focused on Amanda’s job, art restoration. Her challenge: An entire face is missing from a grouping by Titian. She “restores” it by filling the gap with, yes, Freddie Prinze’s face and head, complete with a haircut that doesn’t exactly match the Renaissance period.
But never mind. Give the movie the benefit of the doubt. Maybe one of those Renaissance geniuses like Michelangelo invented Supercuts clippers at the same time he invented bicycles and submarines. What’s really odd is that the face is not in the style of Titian, but in the style of Norman Rockwell. Obviously it was only with the greatest restraint that Amanda was able to prevent herself from adding a soda fountain to the background.
Now what about that eruption of unspeakable brown stuff that coats the supermodels as they hide behind a shower curtain in a bathroom? Why was that supposed to be funny? The scene betrays a basic ignorance of a fundamental principle of humor: It isn’t funny when innocent bystanders are humiliated. It’s funny when they humiliate themselves. For example, Head Over Heels would be funny if it were about the people making this movie.
High Tension
(DIRECTED BY ALEXANDRE AJA; STARRING CéCILE DE FRANCE, MAIWENN LE BESCO; 2005)
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So is this movie. Alexandre Aja’s High Tension is a slasher film about a madman prowling a rural area of France, chopping, slicing, and crunching his way through, let’s see, a body count of five or six people, including a small child that the film does not neglect to show crumpled and dead in a cornfield. That’s what it’s about, anyway, until we discover it actually consists of something else altogether, something I think is not possible, given our current understanding of the laws of physics.
The movie premiered at Toronto 2003 in a version that would clearly have received an NC-17 rating. It has been edited down to an R, perhaps the hardest R for violence the MPAA has ever awarded, and into the bargain Lions Gate has dubbed great parts of it into English. Not alclass="underline" There are inexplicable sections where the characters swear in French, which is helpfully subtitled.
I had forgotten how much I hate dubbing, especially when it’s done as badly as in High Tension. It’s lip-flap on parade. The movie was originally shot in French, but for purposes of dubbing, one of the characters, Alex (Maiween Le Besco), has been given an American accent. As she and her friend Marie (Cecile De France) arrive at the country home of Alex’s family, Alex warns her: “Their French is even worse than mine.” Since the parents hardly speak except to scream bilingually, this is not a problem.
The story: Alex and Marie are driving out to a country weekend with Alex’s parents. Alex seems normal, but Marie is one of those goofy sorts who wanders into a cornfield for no better reason than for Alex to follow her, shouting “Marie! Marie!” while the wind sighs on the sound track—a track that beavers away with Ominous Noises throughout the movie; is there a technical term like Ominoise?
The girls are followed into the deep, dark woods by a large man in blood-soaked coveralls, who drives a battered old truck that must have been purchased used from a 1940s French crime movie. We know he’s up to no good the first time we see him. We know this because he drops a woman’s severed head out the window of his truck.
At the isolated country home, Marie gets the guest room in the attic and goes out into the Ominoise night to have a smoke. There is a swing hanging from a tree limb, and she sways back and forth on it while she smokes, so that later we can get the standard thriller shot of the swing seat still swinging, but now suddenly empty. This is not because Marie has been shortened by the decapitator, but because she has gone back into the house. Soon it’s lights out, although there is enough in the way of moon-glow and night lights for us to see Marie masturbate, perhaps so that we can see if it makes her lose her mind or anything.
The killer (Philippe Nahon) breaks into the house, stomps around heavily, and slaughters everyone except Alex, whom he takes prisoner, and Marie, who hides under the bed—yes, hides under the bed. The killer lifts up the mattress to check, but looks under the wrong end. Uh, huh. Marie should then remain still as a church mouse until the killer leaves, but no, she follows him downstairs and eventually ends up locked in the back of the truck with the kidnapped and chained Alex.
From the point when Marie crawls out from under the bed and follows the killer downstairs, she persists in making one wrong decision after another and ignoring obvious opportunities to escape. Perhaps she feels her presence is needed for the movie to continue, a likely possibility as the list of living characters shrinks steadily. She does have wit enough to pick up a big kitchen knife, so that we can enjoy the slasher movie cliché where such knives make the noise of steel-against-steel all by themselves, just by existing, and without having to scrape against anything.
After the truck leaves the deserted house and stops at a gas station, Marie has another opportunity to get help, but blows it. Reader, take my advice and never hang up on a 911 operator just because you get mad at him because he’s so stupid he wants to know where you’re calling from, especially not if the slasher has picked up an ax.
The rest of the movie you will have to see for yourself—or not, which would be my recommendation. I am tempted at this point to issue a Spoiler Warning and engage in discussion of several crucial events in the movie that would seem to be physically, logically, and dramatically impossible, but clever viewers will be able to see for themselves that the movie’s plot has a hole that is not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven right through it.