With White Material (2009), French director Claire Denis has done an intelligent and provocative job of presenting the human inability to see things as they really are.  Isabelle Huppert’s Maria, a white woman in Africa, is deluded about the danger posed by ferocious civil-war fighters.  Her indolent son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) responds to the conflict by becoming a gun-toting troublemaker—much to his peril.  In the realm they live in, human life could not be cheaper; no one can afford to be blind.

Denis’s film has a nervous energy and a real punch to it.  It’s candid.  If it had an MPAA rating it would probably be NC-17 because it briefly shows an actor’s impressive penis.

(In French with English subtitles)

Français : Isabelle Huppert au festival de Cannes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Darkness (2018) is not a Hitchcock-like thriller, even though it wants to be. It features too many banal camera shots. Too, it suffers from a certain banal complexity—banal now—which sometimes confused me. The protag it concerns is a blind young woman (Natalie Dormer) who desires revenge on a Serbian businessman and vicious criminal.

Directed by Anthony Byrne with a screenplay by Byrne and Dormer, at least the film is properly disturbing about straightforward violence. As well, a few impeccable performances emerge, as from Miss Dormer—credible as a blind person and a nifty fit for an espionage thriller. Along with a very attractive elfin face, Dormer has a thin body whose breasts she knows she can be proud of. Her nudity is meant to contribute to the movie’s arthouse look and cred except, unfortunately, In Darkness is not a success.

A movie like Double Indemnity (1944) could never be far-fetched since every fifth episode of Dateline confirms that the premise is authentic. A man and his new female lover, with money in their sights, murder the lover’s lousy husband. Billy Wilder adapted the story from a James M. Cain novel, co-writing it with Raymond Chandler, and although the work is not a signature Wilder flick (as Ace in the Hole and The Apartment are), it serves up the same theme of corruption that resulted in Wilder’s humorous near-misanthropy.

D.I. itself isn’t humorous, of course; it’s potboiler drama with a lot of frowning in it. Do understand, though, that what goes down quite well in an efficient novel—viz., a lot of dialogue—does not necessarily go down well in a movie. Still, it matters that Chandler authored the characters’ talk, so adult and peppery. . . Wilder turned out a decent film noir, without—fortunately—becoming known for film noir.

What if there was an actual manifestation that it was two peoples’ destiny to be together? In life no such manifestation exists; in Ildiko Enyedi‘s superb Hungarian film, On Body and Soul (2017), it does. Here, a taciturn, educated woman, Maria (Alexandra Borbely), who is afraid of physical intimacy, starts having dreams in which she is a female deer in a forest. Her colleague at a slaughterhouse business, the low-key, moderately disabled Endre (Geza Morcsanyi), is having the same dreams, wherein he is a male deer, with Maria’s deer. After the two learn about this, they are naturally intrigued and they presently intuit that they ought to, well, love each other. But how is the repressed, backward Maria to do this?

The deers’ forest in the dreams is patently idyllic. The slaughterhouse where Maria and Endre work, where animal bodies are bloodied and carved up and where flawed people walk around, is far from idyllic. It’s just necessary. The idyl, the region of the “soul,” however, is what is drawing the would-be lovers.

On Body and Soul is as well-structured as it is unusual. Estimably shot by Enyedi (a woman), it makes its points visually with precision and care. That Enyedi seems talented as a writer makes me wonder how good are the feature films she directed decades ago; her last one before this 2017 picture was released in 1999! She has a lot to show for this break.

(In Hungarian with English subtitles, and offered on Netflix)

From a Tom Perrotta novel, the 1999 movie Election is a smartass piece of goods with some thoroughly cheap—and, yes, progressive—stuff concerning a teenage lesbian (Jessica Campbell). (It’s schematic too.)

What’s acceptable is that the film is about a man (Matthew Broderick) who fails as a moral representative to a younger generation. But it is also about those of the younger generation who will themselves fail as moral representatives when they get older, for corruption is seeping in. But there isn’t much on the plus side of Election, for all the effective acting. I don’t like it. Director Alexander Payne gave us more salutary productions in later years.