Miramaxed Out
The most curious thing about Chocolat?which was directed by Lasse Hallstrom, the filmmaker behind My Life as a Dog, Once Around and The Cider House Rules?is how unsexy and uncinematic it is. Content-wise, it could go straight to Bravo or A&E without having to be edited (except to make room for commercials). If either channel wanted to turn it into a half-hour sitcom, the scripts would write themselves, and if the writers got stuck, they could always consult the film's sitcommy subplots for inspiration. There's an anal-retentive young mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) who won't let her son play with Grandma (Judi Dench), an anti-authoritarian old woman who's been fighting conservatism and prudishness her whole life. There's an abused young wife (Lena Olin) who escapes her dimwitted pig of a husband (Peter Stormare, who else?) and finds peace and self-actualization in the chocolate shop. And of course, no tale of liberation would be complete without a self-appointed guardian of morality, a self-righteous little prig who keeps tabs on everybody's private business and even ghostwrites the young priest's sermons, a Kenneth Starr-type who chides everyone for eating and fucking too much but desperately wishes he could indulge himself.
In Chocolat, this character is a nobleman named the Comte de Reynaud. The fact that he's charming, at times fascinating, owes more to Alfred Molina's wry, pitch-perfect, slightly self-mocking performance than to anything in the script. (When Reynaud finally gives in to his animal impulses, the image is so funny, pathetic and touching that you almost forget the painless superficiality of all that came before.) Binoche, meanwhile, suffers the fate of many fine actresses who become famous playing character parts and art house leads, then graduate to big-budget, leading-lady status; though unquestionably the star of Chocolat, she's also the film's least quirky, least interesting character, so muted she's nearly neutered. Quelle tragedie! Binoche, a woman so powerfully sexy that the very sight of her has been known to induce puberty in trees and rocks, is stuck playing a sad-eyed repository of wisdom, the equivalent of a bartender or a saloon piano player or a shrink?someone to whom more colorful characters tell their troubles. Vianne Rocher is a nomadic single mom whose chocolate confections make normally staid townspeople moan with erotic pleasure, but who's so chaste in her own life that she might as well be wearing a habit. She eventually develops a romantic relationship with a guitar-plucking gypsy (Johnny Depp) who lives on a boat. But their relationship is built around domesticity (homecooked meals, door repair) rather than carnal heat and intellectual freedom, so it feels oddly neutered as well.
What on Earth was Hallstrom thinking? Depp, like Binoche, is one of the most feral stars in cinema, yet in Chocolat, he's stuck playing a cute-but-harmless, hunky next-door-neighbor type?the kind of character who, when well-cast, can jump-start an unknown hunk's career, but who has no business being played by someone as experienced and multifaceted as Depp. The actor's misuse here is a minor shame: How can you cast Johnny Depp as a guitar-plucking gypsy who lives on a boat and not let him be sexy, or provocative, or even terribly interesting?
The whole thing is more interesting as a position paper for the Miramax wing of the Democratic Party than as a freestanding motion picture. One can almost imagine Miramax honchos (and bigtime Democratic Party contributors) Bob and Harvey Weinstein nodding their heads sagely while they watched a rough cut, thinking they were about to release not just a picture, but a parable?a story that would echo recent events in American politics, like the puritan revolt of the far right wing in the 90s and Starr's icy-relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton, which conservatives insisted was about perjury and liberals insisted was all about blowjobs and how conservatives can't stand the idea of somebody else getting one. The message of Chocolat can be boiled down thusly: "The puritans are forever trying to shut down the artists and free spirits. If we circle the wagons and keep showing them how to have a good time, eventually they'll come around. And if they don't, we'll stand and fight." As a liberal who sympathizes with creative people, I'm on board with that sentiment; as a moviegoer, I find it incredibly boring and obvious. But that's the Miramax strategy, and if you go to the movies regularly, good luck avoiding it.
Unlike Chocolat, the Italian period piece Malena, which also appears to have been plotted from a Miramax Mad Lib, has more sex than food. It's an Italian-language drama about a pubescent small-town Italian boy's all-consuming crush on the local sexpot. Monica Bellucci becomes promiscuous after her husband is drafted into the army, ultimately servicing both the Italian fascists and the Nazis. This voluptuous beauty's guitar-shaped torso and ripe melon breasts prompt the town's men to abandon their deeply held conservative values?at least when they're having sex with Malena or furiously masturbating while thinking about Malena. Naturally, these guilty men and their equally uptight, hypocritical women scorn and punish Malena for being so sexy and for doing whatever she needs to do to survive World War II. As Miramax tells us, moral values are relative, and people who won't admit it tend to persecute those who do.
I don't often get angry at an utterly inconsequential film, but Malena made me angry. Director Giuseppe Tornatore (who also wrote the screenplay) lays on the empathy for Malena, but it's all a big fake. Unfurling in luxurious widescreen, with a weepy score by Ennio Morricone and a voiceover narration by one of those standard-issue sadder-but-wiser, raspy-voiced old Italian guys, the main character, Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro), remains undefined; all we know is that his lust for Malena is more pure than that of his horny pals. But the film's most unfortunate closeup?Renato's pants rising from the force of a big ol' boner?could be a metaphor for Tornatore's direction.
Malena decries the treatment of its title character?a lovely creature who uses her only resource, her fantabulous bod, to survive a difficult period of Italian history?but while it's sympathizing, it also whacks off. Tornatore worships Bellucci the way Hugh Hefner worships his bunnies. She's naked or half-naked in a variety of sex scenes, changing scenes, voyeuristic scenes and fantasy sequences; Tornatore lingers over her admittedly stunning figure, filming it from a variety of angles, creating what amounts to an advertisement for feminine pulchritude. While I have no objection to that sort of thing per se, Tornatore's decision to couple borderline softcore porn with a scathing indictment of wartime Italy's false puritanism and scornful hypocrisy is the height of phoniness. It's as if Hefner had decided to print, "What kind of a sick individual reads this magazine?" at the bottom of every page of Playboy. When Malena is savagely beaten and humiliated at the end of the war, it's harrowing, all right, but Tornatore makes sure to have one of the mob rip off Malena's top so that we can get one last lingering look at her breasts.
Rounding out the holiday Miramax triptych is Roland Joffe's Vatel, a spectacularly overproduced French period piece whose title character (Gerard Depardieu, natch) is an events planner at the palace headquarters of a western French province circa 1671. The film has more food and scenery than sex, and more running time than drama; like Chocolat, it's set in France, but it has an international cast, and everybody speaks English. Depardieu's character, a peasant who rose to a position of influence because of his ability to show other people a good time, is in love with the voluptuous and forward-thinking Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman). Anne would like to be with Vatel but can't (1) break free of social constraints or (2) convince Vatel to make a bold move on her.
Funded largely with French government subsidies and unveiled at the 2000 Cannes film festival to a largely indifferent audience, Vatel is what's known as a "pickup"?meaning it was produced outside the studio's purview and picked up for distribution after the fact. By widespread consensus, Vatel is NyQuil to American audiences, or to any viewer who isn't utterly fascinated by royal events-planning circa 1671. Though nobody can say for sure why Miramax acquired it, the rumor mill says it was a goodwill gesture toward Thurman?an Oscar-nominated star of Miramax's 1994 hit Pulp Fiction, who, like The English Patient Oscar-winner Binoche and Shakespeare in Love star Gwyneth Paltrow, is considered a "Miramax girl." The film's plot doesn't fit the same Miramax Mad Lib that produced Chocolat and Malena, but it does replicate bits and pieces of other Miramax hits. For example, Vatel is somewhat like the all-business, no-pleasure butler character in Columbia's Remains of the Day.
Vatel's ultimately way too dull to merit more than cursory consideration; the only reasons to see it are the costumes, the sets and Tim Roth's performance as a sneering fop who covets Anne and alternately respects and undermines Vatel. Miramax conspiracy theorists might also have fun speculating on which Vatel character the Weinsteins empathized with most strongly: Roth's conniving minor royalty, Thurman's exquisite beauty in search of a suitor or Depardieu's Vatel, an ex-peasant who rose to privilege because of his ability to give the audience what it wants, but has since become enslaved by this very talent.