Financial Times (London,England)
September 10, 1992, Thursday
STEPHEN AMIDON
LES AMANTS DU PONT NEUF Leos Carax
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION Jamil Dehlavi
HOUSESITTER Frank Oz
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY John Glen
Les Amants du Pont Neuf is a film about excess – both romantic and cinematic. It is the tale of a homeless street performer (Denis Lavant) and a young artist (Juliette Binoche) who has taken to the gutter after learning that she is going blind. They meet sleeping rough on Paris’s Pont Neuf and are soon having a passionate affair that involves varying amounts of sex, intoxication, tenderness and thievery. Writer-director Leos Carax throws all caution to the wind in telling the lovers’story, moving recklessly from one daring set-piece to another. He is not afraid to have his couple water ski down the Seine as fireworks cascade from above, or show the nearly sightless Binoche breaking into the Louvre to run her fingers over a Rembrandt. Contrasted with these lyrical moments are distinctly earthy scenes, such as documentary footage shot in a refuge for the homeless or a midnight romp on a beach with an erect Lavant prancing through the surf like a naughty Greek deity. Despite Carax’s flair and commitment, his film fails to grip the emotions the way it does the eyes and ears. Binoche and Lavant are so relentless they seem like automata whose directional switches are stuck on ‘passion’. Carax has said he wanted to show love in its ‘raw’state, without the ‘trappings’of bedrooms or small talk or, alas, laughter. Unfortunately, he seems to have succeeded. Writer-director Jamil Dehlavi’s Immaculate Conception is another film dealing with the weightier aspects of love-making. James Wilby and Melissa Leo play a young Western couple who, while working in Pakistan, visit a fertility shrine run by eunuchs in an effort to have the child they have always wanted. After being drugged and unofficially inseminated by the local stud, Leo has her child, only to have her marriage fall apart when her sceptical husband insults the eunuchs and then cheats on her. All the while, the nation around them is in turmoil, with the Rushdie riots and the death of President Zia adding a further sense of danger to their predicament. The best thing about the film are the insights it provides into modern Pakistani culture, but Dehlavi is unable to carry through his complex story, complicating it with pointless subplots and relying too often on ham-fisted melodrama. Romance receives a far more antiseptic treatment in Housesitter, an amusing and only occasionally vapid farce, starring Steve Martin as a lovelorn architect who joins forces with good-hearted con woman Goldie Hawn to win back the girl of his dreams. No points for guessing the outcome. Director Frank Oz keeps things enjoyable by minimising Martin’s mugging and letting the resourceful Hawn do most of the work. Which brings us to Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, a woefully inept effort which is best left undiscovered. The makers must have intended the film to be a good old swashbuckling epic, though the whole thing comes across as an uninspired parody of the genre. It is hard to know what to single out for criticism here, though Mario Puzo’s cliche-ridden script should be used as a ‘how-not-to’manual for budding screenwriters. The acting, which features such castaways as Tom Selleck as King Ferdinand and Rachel Ward as Queen Isabella, is uniformly bad, with the exception of Marlon Brando as Torquemada, who chooses not to act at all in his ten minutes on screen, thereby inoculating himself against assessment.
