Young Adam
YOUNG ADAM stars Ewan McGregor as Joe, a charming bookish drifter who’s chosen to work on a barge that travels between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Before long he’s caught up in a passionate affair with the bargeman’s wife (in a powerful performance by Tilda Swinton), but that is not his only dark secret: there was another woman before her, the hauntingly beautiful Cathie (Emily Mortimer), and it begins to look as if Joe may have played a role in her death by drowning. David Mackenzie has adapted Alexander Trocchi’s disturbing underground classic into a film that is splendidly acted, visually striking, and morally subversive. 93 min. Scotland, 2003.
The Flower of Evil
Claude Chabrol’s fiftieth feature, THE FLOWER OF EVIL is a master’s summing up of all that he does best, set in a milieu that he has made his own. The distinguished facade of a wealthy French provincial family starts to crack when the wife (Nathalie Baye) ventures into local politics and a discontented son (Benoît Magimel) returns from a long sojourn in America. It isn’t long before buried hints of murder, adultery, incest, and wartime collaboration are emerging into the open and disrupting the refined surfaces of a comfortably corrupt dynasty. Chabrol charts the increasingly venomous proceedings with merciless precision, an eye alert to the rituals of French political life, and a strong vein of perverse humor that blossoms in an outrageous (and unexpectedly hilarious) finale in which predictable notions of good and evil are turned neatly on their head. 104 min. France, 2003.
Good Morning, Night
Revisiting the politics of his own early films, such as China Is Near (1967) and In the Name of the Father (NYFF1971), Marco Bellocchio in GOOD MORNING, NIGHT restages one of the most notorious episodes in Italian political history: the 1978 kidnapping of President Aldo Moro (Roberto Herlitzka) by a cell of the Red Brigade terrorist group. Bellocchio focuses on the only female member of the terrorist band, Anna (Maya Sansa), as she tries to balance her revolutionary dreams with the lulling routines of everyday life. Posing as a young housewife (Moro is kept in a tiny cell built behind one of her bookcases), she finds herself increasingly alienated from her militant comrades, and begins thinking of a way to turn their prisoner free. 100 min. Italy, 2003.
Elephant
Working with a cast of students who collaborated on the script and making extraordinary use of an abandoned school in Portland, Oregon, Gus Van Sant in ELEPHANT creates a tender and moving picture of the life of a high school in the hours before catastrophe erupts. To call this a dramatization of the Columbine massacre is not to do it justice. Tracking his young characters through hallways and across athletic fields, capturing the freshness and fragility of their smallest encounters and actions, Van Sant elicits a sense of both the beauty of common experience and the festering emotions capable of sweeping it all away. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. 81 min. USA, 2003.
Free Radicals
As she’s leaving the Rio airport, Manu asks some fellow travelers to snap a last photograph of her in Brazil; hours later, she’s floating in the Gulf of Mexico, the only survivor after a freak tornado downs her plane. Five years later she’s working as a cashier in the supermarket of a small Austrian town. How does one construct a life after such an experience, aware that seemingly arbitrary forces can suddenly rise up and decide who lives and who doesn’t? In FREE RADICALS Barbara Albert, whose powerful debut Northern Skirts was shown in the 2000 New Directors/New Films festival, creates an intricate portrait of Manu and her world, her family, friends and acquaintances, detailing how “causes” in one life can lead to unintended “effects” in others. 120 min. Austria, 2003.
