Cuteness and sentimentality mar Daniel Gamburg’s Tsipa & Volf (2000, 25 min.), a home-movie-like portrait of a Jewish-Russian couple who’ve been together for half a century (which I only sampled), as well as Ryo Hayashi’s fictional short Useless (2000, 14 min.), about a Japanese insurance worker who’s retiring. But the three other works on this program refreshingly avoid such pitfalls: Jophi Ries’s Always (1999, 14 min.), a subtle German fiction short about another long-term marriage; Jennifer Petrucelli’s Inside/Out (2000, 8 min.), an affecting documentary about a woman whose face is half-paralyzed; and Scott Catolico’s silly but spirited Canadian jaunt Smoking Can Kill You (1999, 5 min.). (JR) Read more
On the eve of the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris, a young American film freak (Michael Pitt) meets a vaguely incestuous French brother and sister (Louis Garrel and Eva Green) at the Cinematheque Francais and gets drawn into their perverse games, which involve sex as well as cinephilia. Less sexy, believable, literary, and transgressive than Gilbert Adair’s 1988 source novel The Holy Innocents, which he adapted for director Bernardo Bertolucci, this watchable if far-fetched movie (2003) is seriously marred by its three leads; only Garrel manages to suggest a person rather than a fashion model dutifully following instructions. And ironically, despite the nudity that provoked an NC-17 rating, the film suffers from its own censorship of the novel’s homosexual elements. 115 min. (JR) Read more
