Baise-Moi **
Dirs: Coralie, Virginie Despentes
With: Raffaëla Anderson, Karen Bach, Delphine MacCarty
73 mins, cert 18
www.baisemoithemovie.com
Well, at least it is pornographic. It's not like the recent dire and clueless The Pornographer, which might as well have been called The Stenographer, or The Palaeographer. This much-trumpeted shocker from France, written and directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi from Despentes' novel, about two young women on the run from the law, does indubitably deliver numberless scenes of 100% guaranteed genuine penetration, fellatio and erect penises in the commonplace hardcore idiom. And not just sex, of course, but violence as well, both in the sense of an unwatchably brutal rape in the opening scenes (the BBFC cut 10 seconds from the sequence) and the general vaguely retributive mayhem against men, and indeed women, sprayed about by Bonnie and Bonnie. And it is this violence, and the spurious and implausible drama bolted on, which transfers the movie from the arena of hardcore sex to softcore controversy.
In some ways, the full-on, in-your-face explicitness of Baise-Moi is an understandable counterblast to fatuous middlebrow dramas which tease and make sport with the power relations of sex without having the guts to say what it is they're talking about (see The Business of Strangers below).
Raffaela Anderson and Karen Bach play Manu and Madine, two women for whom the word "disaffected" is not inappropriate. One has been in a porn film, the other enjoys porn; they've both been screwed around by men and, in their post-feminist, post-modern empowered way, team up and take revenge, like an extreme version of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise or Michael Winner's little-known, little-loved Dirty Weekend. They are turned on by each other, but aren't gay, as such: they like bringing back a couple of guys to their twin-bed hotel rooms to watch each other having sex - blowing the guys, then blowing them away. But they worry about their lack of style as they dispatch their victims. "Where are the witty lines?" one moans. Yes - and where are the police? Where is the CCTV evidence that would have nabbed them in 24 hours?
Despite the hard, flat digital video cinematography, and the general self-congratulatory sense of keepin' it real, this is as unreal, as, well, pornography. It clearly aspires to much more, though - a radical, avant-garde commentary on sex, power and penetration, maybe. But the intellectual penetration of this sour, lifeless movie is pretty shallow.
Panic Room **
Dir: David Fincher
With: Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam
112 mins, cert 15
www.spe.sony.com/movies/panicroom
The main panic you'll feel is being trapped inside a small, airless, overhyped movie with no prospect of being allowed out for a good couple of hours. Jodie Foster and her mini-me daughter move into an eccentric Manhattan townhouse after her divorce - and it's got a very strange feature: a fully functioning bunker to retreat into when violent burglars come a-calling. Which they do. Director David Fincher trundles out his trademark sub-atomic swoops through walls and floors, and some by-the-numbers tension/shocker moments that function like snooze-alarms in the general creeping dullness.
As so often, Jodie Foster is a bafflingly prim and solemn screen presence who somehow leaches the energy and suppleness out of a film. But this movie is in any case dotted with hilarious offences against plausibility. For some reason, the utterly impregnable room, with its elaborate hi-tech ventilation system, has a manky old length of pipe leading directly out into the street, handy for flashing SOS messages through. And the high point comes when Jodie Foster - trapped, but sensing that the main phone line is still working - wrenches the intercom phone handset out of the wall and ingeniously "taps it into" the phone system's exposed wire to call the cops. Yeah, right. Perhaps for an encore, she can set up a fax, internet and cable-TV connection with a length of twine and an old Fairy Liquid bottle.
The Business of Strangers **
Dir: Patrick Stettner
With: Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Fred Weller, Mary Testa, Jack Hallett
84 mins, cert 15
thebusinessofstrangers.com
This, I'm very much afraid, is Baise-Moi Lite for flabby liberals, precisely the sort of muddled, PC, good-taste, almost-angry feminist issue movie that gives the mainstream a bad name. The shame is that it has two excellent performers, Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles, doing their very considerable best, and writer- director Patrick Stettner summons up an intriguingly oppressive corporate culture in which the action is played out.
Channing is a tough executive, staying out-of-town in a faceless hotel. Psychologically unglued by rumours that she is about to be laid off, she fires and humiliates her assistant, Stiles. But then they are thrown together by events. They sort-of have a generational conflict; they sort-of toy with a sapphic situation; they sort-of take revenge on a guy who may or may not be a rapist, or potential rapist. Ho hum. It's the sort of thing that Neil LaBute might have put some heat under. This is lukewarm.
Showtime **
Dir: Tom Dey
With: Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, Pedro Damián, Dante Beze
95 mins, cert 12
www2.warnerbros.com/showtime
The action-comedy odd-couple buddy movie has never looked lamer than this. Eddie Murphy retreads his schtick from 48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop as an LAPD patrolman and would-be actor who yearns for stardom and keeps eight-by-ten publicity shots in his squad car glove-compartment; Robert De Niro is a tough professional detective who hates that stuff. They are thrown together when the force bullies him into taking part in a reality-TV cop show with his wacky new partner.
In Midnight Run with Charles Grodin, De Niro showed he can play funny in this kind of material, but here he's just dour and uninspired, and Rene Russo as the regulation cynical-manipulative producer is deeply unconvincing. The only decent thing about this is William Shatner, who puts in a good-sport cameo, giving the two unlikely cops a TJ Hooker masterclass in cathode-ray-tube police work.
Dust *
Dir: Milcho Manchevski
With: Adrian Lester, Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham, Anne Brochet
127 mins, cert 18
This very tiresome, overblown piece of machismo from director Milcho Manchevski made a terrible beginning to last year's Venice film festival, and looks no better now. Ostensibly about two American cowboy-mercenaries at the turn of the century, who arrive in the wild east of the war-torn Ottoman empire, this is a laboured attempt to imbue Macedonian nationalism with a bit of Butch-and-Sundance glamour.
Their story is told in flashback by an old lady in Manhattan holding a burglar at gunpoint - and by the end, you'll feel you're being held at gunpoint too. All three male principals are supposed to be American, yet they're played by two Brits and an Australian: Adrian Lester, Joseph Fiennes and David Wenham, and the feeling of ersatz is overpowering in this British-German-Italian-Macedonian co-production. Wenham in particular sounds like a cross between Walter Brennan and Benny Hill.
Mother India ****
Dir: Mehboob Khan
With: Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Kanhaiyalal
172 mins, no cert
Here is the mighty ancestor of the Bollywood genre. Mehboob Khan's 1957 blockbuster is a conservative, virile epic of rural life. Radha, played by screen queen Nargis, is a strong, passionate earth mother, tilling the soil with the plough on her back when there are no oxen, raising her children alone and exploited by a local moneylender. Her son conceives a fanatical hatred for this man; his obsession, coupled with Radha's need to live within the boundaries of the law and common decency, ends in classical tragedy.
This looks a bit creaky now, but it's a big, entertaining work, with echoes of The Good Earth and Gone With the Wind. There are real-life echoes too: when the aged Radha is finally prevailed upon officially to open the new dam, though she is wary of this modern technology, it is impossible not to think of Arundhati Roy.
Pather Panchali *****
Dir: Satyajit Ray
With: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta
115 mins, cert U
This classic from 1955 is the extraordinary result of director Satyajit Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra being utterly new to their craft, yet demonstrating a miraculous gift for lighting scenes, handling non-professional actors, composing wonderful close-ups and intimate moments, and allowing narrative to flow in the most unforced way. The first in the Apu trilogy, it shows the beginnings of the young boy Apu's life, his relationship with his sister, his harassed mother, ancient aunt and his priest father who will finally take them away from their remote Bengal village. It is a luminous, transcendental masterpiece.
