Town and Country (104 mins, 15) Directed by Peter Chelsom; starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Garry Shandling, Goldie Hawn
La Saison des Hommes (124 mins, 12) Directed by Moufida Tlatli; starring Rabia Ben Abdallah, Sabah Bouzouita
Ginger Snaps (104 mins, 18) Directed by John Fawcett; starring Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Mimi Rogers
Out of Depth (98 mins, 18) Directed by Simon Marshall; starring Sean Maguire, Rita Tushingham; Nicholas Ball
Taxi 2 (82 mins, 15) Directed by Gérard Krawczyk; staring Samy Naceri, Emma Sjöberg, Frédéric Diefenthal
Nowhere to Hide (110 mins, 15) Directed by Lee Myung-Se; starring Park Joong-Hoon, Ahn Sung-Ki, Jang Dong-Kun
The Princess and the Warrior (135 mins, 15) Directed by Tom Tykwer; starring Franka Potente, Benno Fürmann, Joachim Król
The joint presence of Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton suggests that Peter Chelsom's Town and Country is setting out to emulate The First Wives Club and Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You as a sophisticated comedy about marriage and adultery in the world of Manhattan's impossibly rich where people go shopping in stretch limos and cross the Atlantic in private jets. And, indeed, it is set at that interface between crisis and Croesus that currently preoccupies American filmmakers.
A rather tired-looking Warren Beatty, resembling a senior citizen waiting for the postman to arrive with his month's supply of Viagra, plays Porter, a successful architect who's two-timing his interior decorator wife, Ellie (Diane Keaton), with a cellist (Nastassja Kinski). Meanwhile, he also drifts into an affair with his best friend's wife, Alex (Goldie Hawn), who has discovered that her rich, antique-dealing husband, Griffin (Garry Shandling), has a lover, though no one until the end (except, of course, the audience) knows that Griffin is gay.
Brian Rix or Ray Cooney, not to mention Feydeau, might have made something of this plot. But not only is nothing about it remotely funny or inventive, the screenplay's co-author, Buck Henry, hasn't even given himself a joke in the role he plays as one of the divorce lawyers involved.
Characters are introduced into the film, then scarcely used - Andie McDowell, for instance, and Nastassja Kinski. Ian McNeice has a part as a restaurateur, but only gets to wear a comic hat. Charlton Heston is given a sly characteristic role as a gun-loving householder who just wants to turn his rifle on some intruder, but gets nothing to sink those massive teeth into, and, as his wheelchair-borne wife, the veteran stage actress Marian Seldes is expected to raise laughs with a string of obscenities.
Time and again, farcical situations are led up to (for example, five women linked by various male adulterers meet in the ladies' room at an important art function) and nothing happens other than the film cutting to one more flat, ineffectual scene. The overall result resembles an expensive box of crackers stuffed with useless Tiffany trinkets from which the manufacturers have forgotten to include any jokes or bangers.
Apparently Town and Country ran into production trouble, with much rewriting and reshooting, and one can only suppose that New Line Cinema must have signed a pact with the Taliban authorities to stage a sneak preview at a downtown Kabul cinema in order to persuade an audience to approve it for general consumption.
One can't imagine that the Tunisian writer-director Moufida Tlatli showed her fine film La Saison des Hommes to more than a few friends before releasing it. Nothing short of an entirely new film could have made this painful, honest picture more popular or ingratiating. The reverse of Town and Country, it's about married couples shackled not by fashion, freedom and prenuptial contracts but by muddled, unchallenged traditions in a changing society.
The women remain behind on the impoverished island of Djerba in the south of Tunisia, weaving and raising children, while their men are forced to work in Tunis or abroad, servicing the tourist industry and returning home once a year for the annual, ironically named 'Season of Men', as if every season wasn't for men. The men are dominant, liberated, insensitive and, during their absence, they're represented by stern, traditional mothers who humiliatingly keep the younger women in line.
The wives are second-rate citizens expected to bear male children (one has an autistic boy who ends up blighting her life), submit to patriarchy and find a little solace in warm sisterhood. But the situation is gradually shifting for the middle classes and this movie is a hopeful expression of that change, though the forces of repression are everywhere.
It's a graceful, subtle film, forceful without being crudely polemical, though one wishes there had been more footage showing the inroads of tourism and Western influences.
John Fawcett's smart, low-budget Ginger Snaps takes the biscuit as the worst title of the year as it has nothing whatsoever to do with cookies but refers to a 16-year-old girl called Ginger cracking up when she belatedly has her first period. This is a little Canadian horror flick with strong echoes of Stephen King and certain memories of Jacques Tourneur's The Cat People, in which the 15-year-old Brigitte, living in a dreadful Ontario tract development, comes to believe that her older sister, Ginger, to whom she's unhealthily close, is turning into a werewolf. The movie is much at its best when dealing merely with suspicions, rather than when later laying out the lycanthropy and laying on the gore.
In one of his Lifemanship books, Stephen Potter devised a form of dedication designed to make reviewers appear insensitive curmudgeons if they wrote badly of the book. One example, I recall, was: 'To Emily in the hope that one day her sight will be restored' (the Emily in question being the author's 98-year-old great aunt). Thus Simon Marshall's gangster picture, Out of Depth, about a nice south London kid called Paul Nixon (Sean Maguire), who accidentally becomes involved with the mob while trying to help his mother (Rita Tushingham) and pays with his life, ends with the words 'Dedicated to the real Paul Nixon'.
This is not enough, however, to save a banal, often risible crime movie that works in black and white with various familiar shades of Kray. The producers say they wanted to make another Get Carter, but the nearest they get is hiring Adam Suschitzky, grandson of Wolfgang Suschitzky, the great Austrian émigré who photographed Mike Hodges's 1971 film, as cinematographer-director.
The French comedy Taxi 2 is just another cinematic video game, a car-chase picture involving dumb cops and black-suited Yakuzas chasing around Marseilles and Paris. Brevity is its only strong suit. The plot turns on the French government trying to sell anti-terrorist devices to the Japanese and thus steal a march on the Germans and the British, who are referred to throughout as ' rosbifs ' in the dialogue and 'limeys' in the subtitles.
As derivative, though infinitely more stylish, is Lee Myung-Se's Nowhere to Hide, a hectic South Korean thriller about brutal cops pursuing ruthless drug traffickers in the port of Inchon. It's all fights, chases, shoot-outs and anxious looks, much of it in the rain, and frequently in slow-motion, freeze-frames and black and white. This is for fans of Oriental thrillers who like being Wooed and wowed.
There has been a succession of movies these past four or five years from all over the western world that could have been called by the same title as Claude Lelouch's example, Chance or Coincidence, or perhaps 'You're Standing on My Fate'. They're all romantic movies about couples meeting under bizarre circumstances and their lives continuing to be intertwined by strange meetings and unexpected relationships. In The Princess and the Warrior, Tom Tykwer has followed up his brisk, likeable Run Lola Run with a torpid example of the genre wherein a fugitive thief saves the life of a psychiatric nurse (the lissom blonde Franka Potente from Run Lola Run ) in a traffic accident he has caused, and becomes inextricably bound up in her life, and she in his.
