Liberal men (and female feminists) in today’s post-MeToo movie industry would never release a film like Brian De Palma‘s Dressed to Kill (1980), for they would obtusely suspect it of being sexist.  It is rather refreshing to see such a candid work from the past, although I myself am bothered by the film’s sensationalism at the beginning and close to the end.  Indeed, it is this and Angie Dickinson‘s second-rate acting that make the film so unpromising for the first 15 minutes.  Then it gets stronger.

Dickinson plays an unhappy, sexually dissatisfied wife and mother who ceases to have any scruples about her marriage.  Eventually she is murdered.  Dressed to Kill, which De Palma wrote as well as directed, is Psycho with sex steadily focused on, sex taken utterly seriously.

The movie, I repeat, gets stronger, but only for a while.  De Palma intentionally steals from Hitchcock but is not as powerful a thriller director as Hitchcock.  Further, his screenplay contains too much that is hard to swallow.  Deeply sensual through its female bodies—including that of Nancy Allen, De Palma’s ex-wife—the movie is nevertheless non-sexist.  Why did it have to be non-sexist sensationalism?

To Denys Arcand, the American empire must be a North American empire, which is to say Canada and the United States (not Mexico).  His film, The Fall of the American Empire (2018), after all, is set in Montreal, where there is as much hunger for ill-gotten money as in Chicago or Houston.

This movie doesn’t cut it, though.  For most of its running time it isn’t dull, but Arcand is an unsatisfying writer, The Barbarian Invasions notwithstanding.  It’s politically insignificant and artistically paltry.

(In French with English subtitles)

The coronavirus phenomenon has prompted me to re-visit the seventh episode of The Tudors, Season 1 (2007), for it concerns the mysterious plague (far worse than COVID-19) of 16th century Europe and the prevalent anguish it caused.  As it drives King Henry the Eighth (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) into what he hopes is safe isolation, scores of people die from the disease, Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) nearly one of them.

Despite its ill-fitting melodrama, it is good commercial drama, somewhat relevant to 2020.  Excellently acted and savvily directed by Alison Maclean, the episode is often potent.  Coming down with the plague, Anne Boleyn quickly departs from a carriage and tramps along the road in disturbing despair.  Despair is never mentioned, but we know it’s there.  This dark moment is later followed by a lovely moment which ends the hour-long episode.  May there be upcoming lovely moments apropos of coronavirus.

Cover of Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening (2007) is almost mediocre but still worth seeing.

Director Andrew Wagner’s adaptation of a novel by Brian Morton, it tells the story of elderly novelist Leonard Schiller, a fictitious New York intellectual, and a female grad student, Heather, who gives the gent an emotional and sexual attention she has no business giving him.  She does so, while making Schiller the reluctant subject of her master’s thesis, because she fell in love with the man whose first two novels meant so much to her.  But Heather plays with Schiller’s feelings.  There is naught but an ugly mismatch here.  Similarly, Schiller’s daughter, yearning for a baby, finds a mismatch in her relationship with the willful boyfriend who desires no children.  The film has to do with hopes stranded and appetites ungratified.  And it has to do with Heather’s uncondonable behavior.

Starting Out is dramatically thin and provides a little unconvincing uplift.  Some of the talk about literature is claptrap.  Never mind what Heather says; does Schiller really have to call one of his novels passionate?  None of which means the movie lacks verity.  Or gravity.  Also true, though, is that the subject matter is sadder than Wagner seems to realize.

Frank Langella IS Schiller the novelist, giving a splendidly truthful performance.  Nearly as strong is Lauren Ambrose, whose Heather is an intelligent extrovert unconscientious in her vulnerability.  And Lili Taylor does a typically nice job as the writer’s middlebrow daughter.