Cover of Storytelling

Todd Solondz‘s Happiness (1998) was such an insufferable film it prompted me to wonder whether Solondz was the slightest bit capable of ever creating a good one.  His 2002 offering, Storytelling, proves that he is, in addition to demonstrating just how puny his talent is for anything exceeding half an hour.  Two independent tales, you see, constitute Storytelling, and only the 30-minute one (“Fiction”), not the hour-long one (“Nonfiction”), works.  In the latter we get confused and meretricious trash about a documentary filmmaker and the Jewish American family he will camera-shoot.  The story never clicks.  Solondz handles the material with cynical misanthropy, of course, but he does the same with the shorter “Fiction,” with a nice result.

“Fiction” tells of a lefty college girl (Selma Blair) who is callously dumped by her cerebral-palsied boyfriend before taking “solace” in the anal sex ministrations of her black creative-writing professor.  He all but rapes her.  The story concerns the fictions on which people feed so indulgently that they refuse to look sordid behavior straight in the face.  It concerns idealism in a vacuum.  Solondz scores with concision and wit, and has worked well with the actors in “Fiction.”  It’s a very sexy thirty minutes too, but with none of the foolish offensiveness of Happiness. 

A laughable nihilist, at least Solondz has not destroyed the whole of Storytelling.

So long as your husband has a job, just let him be unambitious.

‘Tis a lesson Kathy Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) should have learned in the 1956 Crime of Passion. Her husband Bill (Sterling Hayden) is a detective who’s not looking for the future promotion that Kathy would like him to have. Hence the woman engages in some hanky panky to try to ensure this headway. It’s a mistake.

Interestingly, this follows Kathy’s indignant reaction—she has long been a city girl—to the superficiality and complacency she sees in the suburbs where she now lives. It’s pretty melodramatic. Stanwyck’s acting, however, is impressive. And the movie is a grabber. I didn’t feel the connection between Kathy and Bill for a long time, but then close to the end it develops. (Yep, they love each other.) I should also submit that I like Sterling Hayden’s acting less than I like his presence.

The inarticulate fall in love in The Boy Downstairs (2017), a film by Sophie Brooks. Diana and Ben, both young, barely know how to verbally express themselves, not at all helped by the fact that Diana, long after a breakup with Ben, unknowingly moves into his apartment building. Ben has a new girlfriend, but after he calls it quits with her, he gets together with Diana. Both are able to say I love you, but have trouble remaining an item. Transience rules. The characters believe there is weight before finding only weightlessness.

Zosia Mamet (Diana) and Matthew Shear (Ben), though nearly overplaying the couple’s uncertainty, carry the picture with verity. Boy‘s first few scenes are considerably stronger than its last few scenes, but director-writer Brooks often avoids predictability and commonplace crassness. I saw the film on Tubi; it deserves a look.

The short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” offers a title character who, for sure, maintains a life of the mind. Coming from Saul Bellow, this is no surprise. It is also a love story, though. Zetland, or Zet, a philosophy student, meets and marries—is “delightfully married” to—Lottie. Initially having “no interest in surface phenomena,” he comes to appreciate the lot of a knowing but content man. “Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic,” Zet says. There is much to be said for surface phenomena.

Contrary to what some might suspect, “Zetland” is not too cerebral. It is a rather casual serio-comedy.

With her penetrating eyes Sonja Richter gives not a good but a great performance in Open Hearts (2002), from Denmark, as a woman whose fiance is shockingly injured by a passing car before she is all but flatly rejected by the bitter man. The woman finds solace in the supportive doctor (an effective Mads Mikkelsen) whose wife, it so happens, was driving the deadly car. (She is played thoughtfully and interestingly by Paprika Steen). An affair begins between Richter’s character and the doctor.

Harrowing contingency, the fight against one’s own vulnerability, generosity in love—these are the themes of this well-wrought movie directed and co-written by Susanne Bier. Open Hearts is not its proper title, however. The Danish title, Elsker Dig For Evigt, means “Love You Forever.” Okay. But I cannot avoid asking a question: Here, who loves who forever?

(In Danish with English subtitles)