Crafty Women. Films reviewed: Hevn, Love & Friendship, The Intervention
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
In movies, tricksters or con artists are usually played by men. But this week I’m going to talk about movies where women are the sneaky ones. There’s a scheming widow in England’s stately mansions, a mysterious visitor to Norway’s wild west… and a couples’ reunion in the deep south.
Love & Friendship
Dir: Whit Stillman, Based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) is a ravishing woman in 19th Century England. She has beautiful auburn curls and a plunging neckline. She’s also very intelligent – she could charm the cufflinks off a shirtsleeve. Men are like putty in her hands. She’s also morally lax. Marriage is a contract for the hoi polloi – for the priveged it should be thought of as a stepping stone. Lady Susan loves her landed gentry lifestyle, but after the death of her husband Vernon, she has no land, no home… and no income. Luckily she still has 
ample friends and in-laws with money to burn. But when word of her extramarital dalliances reaches the wife of her host, she is forced to flee and come up with a new plan. She sends her grieving daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) off to boarding school and starts the gears aturning.
In addition to her secret bedmate, Lady Susan is being wooed by two men. One is Sir James (Tom Bennett), a rich landowner who smiles a lot and is dumb as a post. The other is young and handsome Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) in whose home 
she is now a guest. He has been warned about her wily ways and is initially resistant to her friendship. But he learns to love her witty repartee and complex verbal jousting. Though she never says so, Lady Susan hopes to marry him and secure her — and her daughter’s — financial status. But her plans start to crumble.
Frederica is kicked out of boarding school because Lady Susan never paid tuition. Lady Lucy Manwaring suspects adultery involving her husband and tries to expose it. And her best friend 
Alicia (Chloe Sevigny) can help her with her schemes in London but only if her much older husband (Stephen Fry) is kept out of the loop. Can Lady Susan win her man, restore her status, keep her secret lover and get the money she wants and needs?
Love & Friendship is a Jane Austen novel re-imagined as a wonderfully witty screwball comedy. Director Whit Stillman took the unfinished story and added his own touches. He introduces each character – and there are many — with their names and brief descriptions appearing on the screen. The acting is good across the board, the costumes, music and settings (shot near Dublin) are all delightful. I liked this one a lot.
Hevn
Dir: Kjersti Steinsbø
Andrea (Siren Jørgensen) is a soft-spoken travel writer with a short boyish haircut. She arrives in a small town in western Norway in the middle of the night, unannounced. Why is she there? She works for a famous travel magazine and wants to interview Morten (Frode Winther) the local hotelier. So the scruffy bartender, Bimbo (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) promises to introduce her to him in the morning.
This is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. And it’s a beauty. Rows of wooden houses line one side of a
pristine green fjord, and stark mountains dominate the other side. And Morten’s white hotel overlooks it all.
The next day the blond and athletic Morten welcomes Andrea and offers her a suite in the empty hotel. And his wife Nina, noticing Andrea came without a suitcase, offers her 
open access to all her clothes.
Andrea is clearly uncomfortable with all the nice things being offered. So uncomfortable that she runs to the bathroom to puke. She hasn’t told them why she’s really there. She’s not a travel writer, her real name is Rebekka, and she’s there to get revenge… through entrapment.
She visited the town with her much younger sister when she was just a teenager. And Morten did something then that led to her sister’s suicide. She wants him to suffer for what he 
did… but did he actually do it? Is he still assaulting young women? And will she be discovered before she carries out her goal?
The movie is called Hevn (means revenge in Norwegian) but this is no Valhalla; its a festering pit of deceit and treachery. ‘s a not-bad psychological thriller. The Nordic scenery is breathtaking and the cast is attractive, but the story is not that gripping. We can understand Andrea’s struggle and feel her passion and fear, but we never learn anything about her backstory. It’s as if she lives only for revenge for her sister’s suicide. The film wavers between Big Issue and psychological thriller, without ever deciding which one it wants to be. This movie is OK, but not great.
The Intervention
Dir: Clea DuVall
Four couples, old friends all, are having a reunion. They meet up in a huge house amidst the Spanish moss of a Carolina plantation. It’s a surprise party of sorts. The surprise is they’re there not to celebrate but to break up a marriage. Ruby and Peter (Cobie Smulders and Vincent Piazza) have careers and kids. But their friends all think it’s a sham – they don’t love each other anymore so why are they still together. So Jessie (Ruby’s sister) and Annie another friend plan to hold a secret intervention to tell that couple to face the music. But look who’s talking! Annie (Melanie Lynskey) is a heavy drinker and refuses to commit to her fiancé. Jessie (Clea DuVall) is in a longterm relationship with her girlfriend but they have yet to move intogether, still don’t live together. And the newly single Jack arrives with another surprise: Lola (Alia Shawkat), a 22 year old loose cannon he picked up at a music festival. Lola is openly bisexual, and ready to jump into bed with anyone who strikes her fancy. Will the intervention succeed or fail? And will any of the couples survive this fraught-filled get-together?
The Intervention is a light and likeable relationship dramedy. By light I mean there’s nothing remarkable about the story. It succeeds on the strength of the excellent comic acting of three women: DuVall, Shawkatt and most of all Lynskey.
Hevn and Love & Friendship both open today: check your local listings. The Intervention — which will be released later this summer — is premiering at Toronto’s Inside-Out LGBT film fest. The festival is on now and for the next 10 days. Go to: insideout.ca for showtimes.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
April 20, 2012 Are All Men Cads? Movies Reviewed: The Deep Blue Sea, Damsels in Distress
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies, for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
I’m back again to review some new movies. Are all men cads, heels, users, liars and cheats? How about douches, stalkers, assholes, Tucker Maxes, players, pricks and opportunists, who will say just about anything to get laid? This question is taken up by two films with male directors and writers, but told from the points of view of the female characters. One is a post-war historical melodrama about a married woman who willingly goes astray; the other a contemporary light comedy about a group of college students who risk being led astray.
The Deep Blue Sea
Dir: Terrence Davies
based on the Play by Terrence Rattigan
The war has ended and, Hester (Rachel Weisz), is a beautiful young woman married to a much older man. Sir William Collyer (Simon Russel Beale) is intelligent, kind, upper class and very rich, and he’s also a judge. He loves Hester dearly, but can’t provide for her sexually. Hester is the daughter of a vicar whose life feels like it’s hit a dead end. Then she meets Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a dashing RAF pilot, a hero in WWII. He’s brash, funny and charming and “makes a pass” at her.
Soon, she’s separated from her husband and trades his mother’s stately home for a dowdy London flat filled with society’s struggling outcasts – like a doctor whose license has been revoked.
The movie opens with Hester’s attempted suicide. The reasons for this, the reactions of her husband and her lover to it, and her final decision, make up the rest of the movie. It’s told through Hester’s flashbacks to the war, her time spent with Freddie and William, and memories of the war. And it tries to explain her strange decision to leave wealth, status and a loving 
husband for a nonchalant cad.
Davies is an remarkable director for whom what you see, and the music you hear is always as important than the dialogue. He doesn’t tell strict linear narratives, but gives impressions of the thoughts and experiences of the main character. This is adapted from the play by Terrance Rattigan, but Davies uses dialogue sparsely. He hints at what’s going on and is rarely explicit. For example when William discovers the aptly-named Hester’s infidelity, you get a brief glimpse of a punch and judy show going on just outside a door.
Although it’s a melodrama, I found it very moving, visually stunning, with an evocative soundtrack often provided by the characters themselves singing period songs in pubs or bomb shelters. The acting is also great – Rachel Weisz’s first good job in a long time, (I was losing faith in her as an actress) with the exception of one strange shouting scene between Hester and Freddie that seemed a bit clumsy and overdone. Not a conventional movie, but a beautiful and moving one.
Damsels in Distress
Dir: Whit Stillman
Lily (Analeigh Tipton, a Michelle Trachtenberg look-alike) is a university student who transfers to Seven Oaks, a former all-girls college in a small New England town. She is immediately befriended by a clique of discerning, conservative women, and moves in with them. They all have flower names like her. Violet (Greta Gerwig), the obvious ring-leader, thinks men all have “B.O.” She knows aromas and colours are very important. Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), an African-American with a recently acquired impeccable British accent, says men are all players. Along with dumb-as-a-post Heather (Carrie MacLemore), the three have a goal: to rescue the downtrodden and suicidal students on campus by distributing donuts and teaching them… tap dancing!
Violet has a theory – aim for the bottom, and only date guys stupider than she is. So she goes for the frat boys (“They’re not “Greeks” – we only use Roman letters here”) some of whom haven’t even learned the colours yet. But her world is sent off-kilter when Lily proves too popular, and has two romantic and handsome boys chasing her. Will the smart, but inexperienced, Lily choose the suave frenchman Xavier (Hugo Becker), who tells her he’s a member of the Cathars and must follow certain sexual rules? Or the charming and successful businessman Charlie (Adam Brody) who just happens to be on campus? And will she ever see through these guys’ transparent ruses?
Damsels in Distress is a very cute, and very funny, coming-of-age story about life in a sheltered, liberal arts college. This is Whit Stillman’s first movie in a long time, and it’s great, like all his movies. He did The Last Days of Disco, Barcelona, and Metropolitan, all very distinctive portraits of educated, but naïve, upper-middle-class people. This one is done in vignettes, over the course of a year, with a terrific ensemble cast — all new, and all terrific. Admittedly, it has a confusing and cobbled-together-looking finish, that leaves you thinking why was that there? but it was just silly, not bad enough to spoil an otherwise fully enjoyable movie.
The Deep Blue Sea is now playing, and Damsels in Distress opens today (Friday, April 20) in Toronto, check your local listings. The Strawberry Tree is showing tonight (Friday) at the Images festival, and tickets for HotDocs, Toronto’s documentary festival, are available now.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site CulturalMining.com.
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