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Tell No One - NR - 125 min - Scope
A = Auditorium
S = Screening Room"Tell No One" will play as a terrific thriller for you, if you meet it halfway. You have to be willing to believe. There will be times you think it's too perplexing, when you're sure you're witnessing loose ends. It has been devised that way, and the director knows what he's doing. Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed. The set-up is the simple part. We meet a married couple, sweethearts since childhood: Alex (Francois Cluzet) and Margot (Marie-Josee Croze). They go skinny-dipping in a secluded pond and doze off on the raft. They have a little quarrel, and Margot swims ashore. Alex hears a scream. He swims to the dock, climbs the ladder and is knocked unconscious. Flash-forward eight years. Alex is a pediatrician in a Paris hospital. He has never remarried and still longs for Margot. Two bodies are found buried in the forest where it is believed she was murdered, and the investigation is reopened. Although Margot's case was believed solved, suspicion of Alex has never entirely died out. He was hit so hard before falling back into the water that he was in a coma for three days. How did he get back on the dock? Now the stage is set for a dilemma that resembles in some ways "The Fugitive." Evidence is found that incriminates Alex: a murder weapon, for example, in his apartment. There is the lockbox that contains suspicious photographs and a shotgun tied to another murder. Alex is tipped off by his attorney (Nathalie Baye) and flees out the window of his office at the hospital just before the cops arrive. "You realize he just signed his own confession?" a cop says to the lawyer. Alex is in very good shape. He runs and runs, pursued by the police. It is a wonderfully photographed chase, including a dance across both lanes of an expressway. His path takes him through Clignancourt, the labyrinthine antiques market and into the mean streets on the other side. He shares a Dumpster with a rat. He is helped by a crook he once did a favor for; the crook has friends who seem to be omnipresent. Ah, but already I've left out a multitude of developments. Alex has been electrified by cryptic e-mail messages that could only come from Margot. Is she still alive? He needs to elude the cops long enough to make a rendezvous in a park. And still I've left out so much -- but I wouldn't want to reveal a single detail that would spoil the mystery. "Tell No One" was directed and co-scripted by Guillaume Canet, working with Harlan Coben, the American author of the novel which inspired it. It contains a rich population of characters, but has been so carefully cast that we're never confused. There are: Alex's sister (Marina Hands); her lesbian lover (Kristin Scott Thomas); the rich senator, whose obsession is race horses (Jean Rochefort); Margot's father (Andre Dussollier); the police captain who alone believes Alex is innocent (Francois Berleand); the helpful crook (Gilles Lellouche), and the senator's son (Guillaume Canet himself). Also a soft-porn fashion photographer, a band of vicious assassins, street thugs, and on and on. And the movie gives full weight to these characters; they are necessary and handled with care. If you give enough thought to the film, you'll begin to realize that many of the key roles are twinned, high and low. There are two cops closely on either side of retirement age. Two attractive brunettes. A cop and a crook who have similar personal styles. Two blondes who are angular professional women. Two lawyers. One of the assassins looks a little like Alex, but has a beard. Such thoughts would never occur during the film, which is too enthralling. But it shows what love and care went into the construction of the puzzle. One of the film's pleasures is its unexpected details. The big dog Alex hauls around. The Christian Louboutin red-soled shoes that are worn on two most unlikely occasions. The steeplechase right in the middle of everything. The way flashbacks are manipulated in their framing so that the first one shows less than when it is reprised. The way solutions are dangled before us and then jerked away. The computer technique. The torturous path taken by some morgue photos. The seedy lawyer, so broke his name is scrawled on cardboard taped to the door. Alex patiently tutoring a young child. That the film clocks at only a whisper above two hours is a miracle. And then look at the acting. Francois Cluzet is ideal as the hero: compact, handsome in a 40ish Dustin Hoffman sort of way, believable at all times (but then, we know his story is true). Marie-Josee Croze, with enough psychic weight she's present even when absent. Kristin Scott Thomas, not the outsider she might seem. Legendary Jean Rochefort, in a role legendary John Huston would have envied. Legendary Francois Berleand as a senior cop who will make you think of Inspector Maigret. And legendary Andre Dussollier sitting on the bench until the movie needs the bases cleared. Here is how a thriller should be made. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Vicky Cristina Barcelona - PG-13 - 97 min - Flat
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomWhen great artists maintain their health and energy into their 70s, amazing things can happen - and they're happening with Woody Allen. His new film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," could not have been made by a young person. Though the characters are young and the film teems with directorial energy and innovation, the film's freedom and control, its inspiration and focus, announce it as the work of a confident and mature artist. With movies, creativity tends to come in waves. Preston Sturges had one perfect wave, and we still know his name 60 years later. Truffaut had two and might have had more had he lived. The lucky ones - Bergman, Hitchcock - do get more, and Woody Allen is in the midst of his fourth. His first wave began his film career. His second began with "Annie Hall," his third with "Hannah and Her Sisters" and his fourth with "Match Point." The latest wave is characterized by an economy of storytelling, confident digressions and a relaxed use of all the narrative devices at his disposal. The screenplays have a flow, as though they were written for pleasure in one draft and just happened to come out perfect. Vicky and Cristina are introduced to us as they ride in a taxi on their first day in Barcelona. The unseen narrator (not Allen) tells us that the young women, there for the summer, are good friends but temperamental and philosophical opposites. Voice-over narration gets a bad rap because it's often added as an afterthought to films that don't hang together in the editing. But in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," the narration was built into the design, and it's used extensively and effectively, placing us securely in the story and giving the whole movie a fable-like aura. Within moments, we know that Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a student of Spanish architecture, in Barcelona to study the Gaudi buildings, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is along for the adventure. Vicky is reasonable and levelheaded, values order and feels that she has her life settled. She's engaged to marry a nice but rather tame executive (Chris Messina). Cristina, by contrast, is impetuous. She wants thrills and excitement. She wants passion. She wants an extraordinary life. So when the lusty painter Jose Antonio (Javier Bardem) approaches the women in a restaurant with a modest proposal, Vicky is appalled and Cristina is intrigued. He wants them to come with him in a private plane for a weekend of art and maybe sex. The movie effectively begins here, with the rest of the story tracing the ways that Jose Antonio's life intersects with those of the women. Along the way, insights are offered without ever needing to be spelled out. Here's one: Perhaps Vicky's scholarship is a sublimation. Perhaps what she is really looking for in her studies is what Jose Antonio represents in the flesh. In the late '70s and '80s, Allen made comedies and dramas, but he's beyond those distinctions now. "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" exists in its own Allen universe, an idiosyncratic mixture of Fitzgeraldian romanticism, Rohmer-esque self-involved loquaciousness and Marx Brothers absurdity. Allen's vision is so clear in his mind that genre demands are swept away. Vicky and Cristina go where they want to go, and nothing seems forced or guided about their journey. It's as if Allen were merely watching them and taking dictation. Allen is famous for not directing his actors, for letting them sink or swim. The actors who thrive are the ones who take this as license to let go. Scarlett Johansson is never more relaxed or appealing or less self-conscious than she is in Allen's movies. Bardem shows new shades of humor and romantic appeal, and Rebecca Hall, as Vicky, is launched as a young actress of rare maturity and intelligence. But the revelation is Penélope Cruz, who has never been better in an American film. Suddenly, and for the first time, her stardom makes sense. As Maria Elena, Jose's Antonio's gifted and neurotic ex-wife, Cruz is on fire - hysterically funny, abandoned, passionate, poignant, with a performance full of shading and wide in range. She's as fun and as powerful as Anna Magnani, and beautiful besides. Cruz just needed somebody to turn her loose. Review by Mick LaSalle, www.sfgate.com
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