|
Shallow and deeply annoying
(Filed: 18/02/2005) 
 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Head-On
The Yes Men
In pictures: top 10 films
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 15 cert, 119 min The
budget's big, the cast is great – and yet, says Sukhdev Sandhu, it's
hard to care about anyone in Wes Anderson's latest film as it leaps
randomly from tragedy to comedy Is it possible
to dislike a film just because of its name? It's certainly possible to
distrust it. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is so knowing and so
arch: the first part striving for a faux-grandiosity that the second
part tries to undercut by its pseudo-geekiness. It sets the tone for
the rest of Wes Anderson's picture, which, like its predecessor, the
breakthrough hit The Royal Tenenbaums, is an endless raid on the quirk
cabinet that wants to be everything - both happy and sad, prattish and
profound, retro and modern - but ends up being plain annoying.  | Ahoy there! Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and
Cate Blanchett in The Life Aquatic
with Steve Zissou |
And
the shame is that it didn't have to be that way. For Anderson has at
his disposal a fairly large budget for someone of his twisty, obsessive
brand of filmmaking. And a great cast - Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston,
Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe - a number of whom he has worked with
before. Murray is Steve Zissou, a Jacques
Cousteau-like oceanographer-cum-documentary-maker, whose career seems
to be in freefall. He's getting old, his latest picture has been
panned, his best friend eaten by a jaguar shark, and a wealthier rival
Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) is threatening to steal his glory. So,
accompanied by a former airline pilot claiming to be his son, Ned
Plimpton (Owen Wilson), he sets out aboard the Belafonte ship with Team
Zissou to go on one last jaguar-hunting trip. Like
contemporary American novelists such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan
Lethem, Anderson, who wrote The Life Aquatic with Noah Baumbach, often
seems to hark back to the golden age of storytelling. His films, this
one included, make a big song and dance about being precisely
delineated narratives. Since his early film Rushmore, however, they've
lacked internal logic or obvious structure; they're just empty tracks
on which Anderson's rolling stock of A-list actors can be shunted to
and fro. So there are pirates. Fatal helicopter
crashes. Near-botched raids on islands to rescue bond company reps.
Zissou flip-flopping about in a frog suit and red hat. A pregnant
journalist called Jane Winslett-Richardson (Blanchett) aboard the ship,
who, to Zissou's regret, shacks up with Ned. A team member, City of
God's Seu Jorge, who pops up every five minutes singing Portuguese
versions of David Bowie songs. Shots of research turtles with cameras
strapped on their shells. It's not so much that
these things don't make sense, or that a film can't accommodate so much
going on; it's just that we should at least, once in a while, care
about some of the characters. But when Anderson leaps so randomly from
tragedy to droll comedy, it's hard for us to invest our emotions in
them. And why should we care when Anderson,
despite the superficial layer of melancholia he smears over
proceedings, appears not to? And when sadness is invoked so flippantly
(Zissou confessing "I know I haven't been at my best this last
decade"), and the talents of actors as gifted as Huston so underused,
it's hard not to think of him as more puppetmaster than director.  | 'I know I haven't been at my
best this last decade' |
For
once, Murray is a let-down. His forte is as the flat-batting straight
man, rather than as a hectic lead. But both Henry Selick's maritime
animation and the saturated colours of Robert Yeoman's photography are
delightful, as is a stunning cross-section shot of the Belafonte. If
only Anderson could stop seeing the screen as little more than a
colouring box, marry content to his super-ornate, carefully assembled
spectacles, and, well, let some light in to his increasingly cloistered
imaginative universe, the results would be magnificent. Head-On 18 cert, 122 min Head-On
is a terrific demolition derby of a film. A punky, noisy romance full
of life and emotion and ideas that captures the moment in the style of
contemporary classics such as My Beautiful Laundrette and
Trainspotting. Like them, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin's film is
a seething ball of subcultural energy that wrestles furiously with
issues of friendship and national belonging. Sibel
(Sibel Kekilli) plays a young Muslim girl so desperate to escape her
conservative family that she slashes her wrists and persuades a
washed-up ageing rocker, Cahit (Birol Unel), to marry her. Against his
will he does so, but, eager to enjoy urban life to the full, she sleeps
around, causing him, even though he's doing the same, a lot of anguish.
So they quarrel and they fight. But their whole lives are quarrels too:
between duty and selfhood, Hamburg and Istanbul, the past and the
future. The film is two hours long, but has barely
a wasted minute. Kekilli, a first-time actress, is a real find, at once
plain and totally gorgeous, hard and vulnerable, fresh in the way she
carries herself and moves across the screen. Unel has the charisma and
powerful gaze of a more lived-in Viggo Mortensen. Head-On,
which won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, is never a tract, never
a morality play. It articulates - all the better for doing so messily
at times - the stop-start and necessarily unfinished journeys through
culture and identity that Turkish guest-workers and their children in
Germany must make. Most of all, it is a ferociously compelling romance
that deserves the widest possible audience. The Yes Men 15 cert, 82 min The
Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, two Americans who hit the
headlines earlier this year when they tricked the BBC by claiming that
they were reps for Union Carbide and said the company would be fully
compensating the victims of the Bhopal tragedy that killed and maimed
thousands of Indian villagers 20 years ago. As stunts go, it made Chris
Morris trying to embarrass Noel Edmonds and Bernard Manning seem rather
tame. But it was part of a series of politically-inspired interventions
they've carried out to expose and undermine the pieties of the
international finance community.  | | Yes sir: Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno |
The
Yes Men is a greatest-hits mix that shows them masquerading as WTO
spokesmen in New York, where they tell a lecture hall full of
incredulous students how they plan to recycle defecated burgers and
pipe them out to people in the developing world; in Finland, where,
characteristically, they euphemise slaves as "an involuntarily imported
workforce"; in Australia, where they apologise to business delegates
for putting profits before ethics. Part
anarchist's cookbook, part guerrilla gig tour, The Yes Men portrays
Bichlbaum and Bonanno as real-life hackers who use sly mimicry to
ridicule corporate rhetoric and liberal economics. The film is a touch
pedestrian, too eager to explain rather than embody the subversive
energies it documents. But its willingness to mock not just the men in
power suits but the journos and news organisations who swallow their
FTSE gibberish is salutary indeed.
Next story: Charm of a salesman
|
