Financial Times (London,England)

December 2, 1993, Thursday

Minus heart and guts

By STEPHEN AMIDON

THE HAWK (15)            David Hayman                                                                    BOUND AND GAGGED: A LOVE STORY (18)David Appleby

LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (U)Alan Resnais

TALE OF THE FOX   Wladyslaw Starewicz
The Hawk is a British screen thriller that strives so hard for efficiency that it winds up jettisoning its characters for a fast, smooth ride. Set in a quiet Manchester suburb, it tells the story of a frustrated housewife (Helen Mirren) who gradually comes to suspect that her straying husband may in fact be The Hawk, a serial killer who has been dispatching women very similar to herself with alarming alacrity. As the clues begin to accumulate, she tries to make her fears public, only to have her own past history of mental illness cast doubt on her reliability as a witness. As is usually the case in these sorts of stories, she is left on her own to investigate whether or not her suspicions are correct.

The best thing about this film is that everyone seems to know they are working to a tried and tested formula. It is a largely seamless production, unpretentious and fast-moving, only coming unglued at the end with a gratuitous sprint to the demolition lot in pursuit of that vital clue. David Hayman’s direction is crisp and Mirren’s performance is as subtly regal as ever.
The problems lie in Peter Ransley’s script. He seems so intent on its mechanics that he neglects the ghost in the machine – fully rounded characters. To be sure, clues accumulate, red herrings wriggle by, a big climax is achieved. But where is the motivation, the psychological nuance? The killer’s mind remains an enigma even after his identity is revealed, while Mirren’s past mental illness is shown to be post-natal depression, hardly likely to cast her suspicions into doubt now that her youngest child is seven or eight. And minor characters, especially the relatives who harbour the killer, are two-dimensional villains.
These are maddening shortcomings, since they could have been rectified in the time it takes to pan along a grimy Manchester street. In the end, the film remains a distinctly cool, grimly functional affair. Any satisfaction to be had by watching the did-he-or-didn’t-he plot unfold remains north of the neck, leaving the heart and the guts untouched.
The best thing about Bound and Gagged: A Love Story is its title, which promises the sort of kinkiness and black humour in the work of Almodovar or David Lynch. Unfortunately, the film proves to be neither sexy nor funny. In fact, it is hard to figure out exactly what were the thematic intentions behind this stylised, off-key road movie to nowhere.
The plot is not without a certain skewered potential – rebellious bisexual Elizabeth (Elizabeth Saltarrelli) kidnaps her lover Leslie (Ginger Lynn Allen) when the latter proves unable to make the break from her abusive husband (Chris Mulkey). Accompanied by Cliff (Chris Denton), an inefficiently suicidal nerd, they set off across the American heartland with the wronged and wrongful husband in pursuit. Their destination is the ranch of a veteran de-programmer (Karen Black), who, Elizabeth hopes, will be able to ‘cure’ Leslie of her dependency on her husband in particular and men in general.
Despite the plot’s potential wackiness, writer/director Daniel Appleby proves incapable of finding either the right comic or erotic pitch to make this strange story work. Since little attempt is made to establish an emotional bond between viewer and characters, much of the film is downright unpleasant. Appleby spends so much time trying to make matters stylishly hip that they wind up not being much of anything at all. The humor is crass, relying on kicks to the groin and smashed heads, while there is a decidedly unfunny sub-plot involving wimpy Chris’s estranged wife and her Native American lover. A bunch of guff about dependency and personal freedom is wheeled out in the final frame in a belated attempt to render meaning, but by then most viewers will have abandoned this road trip for the first bus back home.
When Last Year in Marienbad was first released 32 years ago, it proved the sort of movie that could divide audiences as effectively as a slab of falling masonry. Some hailed Alain Resnais’s second film as a masterpiece which helped liberate cinema from the shackles of narrative dogma, while many others dismissed it as self-indulgent tripe. What is interesting in viewing it now is that it inhabits neither of these extremes, standing instead as a necessary if not exactly enduring stage in the history of French cinema, a 90-minute purgation of its storied past in favour of the New Wave.
For those who have not experienced it, the storyline is both maddeningly simple and inscrutably complex. Set in a German castle which serves as a retreat for the wealthy, Resnais’s elegant and beautifully-shot film choreographs the movements of two would-be lovers as they try to piece together their past, present and future, all the while menaced by the woman’s jealous husband. But any such summation is ultimately reductive in a film where locations can change in the middle of a conversation, where time is irrevocably out of joint, and where textual repetition takes the place of linear exposition.
Viewed in itself, the film is now a distant enigma, an ageing riddle there seems little reason to solve. But when placed in the context of cinema history, it begins to make sense. Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet were not trying to tell a story or even create a genre, but were rather taking a hammer to the work of the masters who had preceded them. By setting the film in a retreat for the upper classes, Resnais deliberately evoked the work of Ophuls and Renoir, only to tear it into glorious shreds. It is as a piece of sumptuous vandalism, and not in establishing any aesthetic criteria for subsequent filmmakers, that Last Year in Marienbad proves revolutionary. Thus only those wanting to understand the evolution of French cinema will feel gratified by this beautiful relic’s re-release.
A French relic with more accessible charms is Wladyslaw Starewicz’s Tale of the Fox, a pioneering 1931 masterpiece of animation. It took the director 10 years to prepare and 18 months to shoot this 60-minute jewel – and it shows. From its small, exquisite puppets to its sophisticated sense of wry humor, this fairy tale oozes care, rivalling anything done in animation since. It reminds you that all the digital technology and computer wizardry in the world cannot beat a solitary injection of passion and humanity.