Reviews: "Comedy of Power"; "Hot Fuzz"

By Robert Avila

Claude Chabrol’s “Comedy of Power” is not quite funny.

Claude Chabrol, that most indefatigable of Nouvelle Vague directors, is arguably the one most preoccupied with the lived realities of women. From “Les Bonnes Femmes” (1960) through “Story of Women” (1988), “La Cérémonie” (1995), and even a screen adaptation of “Madame Bovary” (1991), among other films, Chabrol has repeatedly focused on complex heroines, of inevitably elastic moral dimensions, negotiating their own way in a male-dominated world. Those last three titles were also, of course, collaborations with the estimable Isabelle Huppert, who has often served as a brilliant muse for the director, if a little inconsistently. Their latest partnership falls somewhere between the triumphs of “La Cérémonie” or “Story of Women” and Chabrol’s ill aimed stab at Flaubert, with Huppert here playing a judge plunging headlong into a heady, and increasingly dangerous investigation of corruption between France’s oil industry, leading government officials, and certain oil-rich African states.

The precise details of the case never become very clear and are clearly not the point for Chabrol and co-writer Odile Barski, who base their work on the true story of the female magistrate, Eva Joly, who took on a cabal of very highly placed men in France’s infamous Elf scandal of the 1990s. “Comedy of Power” (L’Ivresse du pouvoir) largely sides with its heroine’s fearless scorn for the corrupt, often boorish bores who are so “drunk” (to cite the film’s original French title) on their own lofty, habitual, and tacit privileges that they are slow in comprehending the predicament she’s put them in. The power of the title points equally, meanwhile, to the infectious, personally risky table-turning undertaken by Huppert’s blithe spirit in going where certainly no man dared go before. The “comedy” that it makes of her crusade, on the other hand, is less than apt, let alone laugh-out-loud. The film strikes a rather unstable balance of suspense, psychological drama, and mocking satire — an almost glib formula that in its harmless nose-thumbing at the upper echelons feels (and looks) more like a television series.

The real-life French magistrate, Joly, was from Norway originally, which made her even more an “outsider” under the circumstances than her sex or the relatively modest rank conferred by her judge’s robes. Huppert and Chabrol have forgone the Norwegian dimension, though Huppert’s good-natured attack on her social superiors is so lacking in respect for the admittedly personally unimpressive but dangerously powerful men that it is as if she were from another country anyway, if not another planet. Indeed, given that even the eventual departure of her weary, somewhat morose husband (Robin Renucci) produces barely a ripple on her insouciant surface, one might get the idea she’s from Venus and they’re all from Mars.

“Comedy of Power” opens Fri/20 at the Roxie.

“Hot Fuzz” offers a cheeky riposte to H-wood’s testosterone lows.

Any country is judged by the image it projects, and in that regard the U.S. has been both history’s most assertive and least flattering self-promoter. We virtually created mass media; we used it from cinema’s earliest days to amplify an American ideal of lone-gun machismo. But even that stereotype, sculpted from silent cowpoke William S. Hart through swaggering John Wayne and terse Clint Eastwood, wasn’t quite exaggerative enough to satisfy viewers here and abroad.

The 1980s introduced a new school of cartoonish live-action heroism exemplified not just by the vehicles for such balloon-bicepted stars as Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but also by filmmaking tooled to flex bulbous muscle in the mode of producers Simpson-Bruckheimer, directors like Tony Scott and Michael Bay, and movies patterned after the ridiculous (and ridiculously successful) 1986 “Top Gun.”

Ever since then, the language of Hollywood action cinema has warped from its prior “Yes — I am a manly man, so don’t yank my chain” to a heedlessly dumb “Yep — got me some BIG swingin’ balls. Yeah!

These movies are almost invariably sexless (despite obligatory sidelined female sex objects), homophobic yet based on male relationships that seem primal despite their often aggressively competitive nature. Dialogue sequences are edited like action scenes; action scenes like music videos. No feat of impossible acrobatics or one-man-versus-a-hundred survival is too ludicrous, so long as it is delivered with video-game aesthetics and there’s a smirking über-he-man (or two) at center. The infantile heroism fantasy embodied here is familiar, but pumped to ‘roid-raging dimensions.

This stuff can’t be good for the youth of today. I mean, I had a G.I. Joe doll when I was a kid, but then I grew up.

For a refreshingly cheeky riposte to all this fake cinematic testosterone, you couldn’t do better than “Hot Fuzz.” Expectations were high for this English comedy simply because it’s the second feature made by the guys behind that genius horror spoof, “Shaun of the Dead.” Odd that it took some Brits to finally, definitively satirize a style that’s plagued mallflicks for over two decades now — at least in a form without puppets (I will always love you best, “Team America: World Police”). But there you are.

London cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is such an over-the-top unstoppable-crime-stopping machine that he makes his fellow officers look bad — so he’s been transferred to the sleepy little hamlet of Sandford, which is so quaint it’s won “Village of the Year” several annums running.

Naturally all these friendly faces and gardening enthusiasms are torture to Nick, who can hardly live without making several arrests a day. He has to make do with busting underage pub patrons and speed-limit scofflaws until a series of violent deaths commence — raising his own alert level to Red but strangely striking the villagers as a merely coincidental pileup of “accidents.”

Helping sorta kinda with our hero’s investigations is his assigned partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of ever-so-amiable police chief Frank (Jim Broadbent), and a wee tub of lard whose major job qualification seems to be an obsession for just the sort of bombastic Hollywood action pics “Hot Fuzz” ridicules senseless. Among other fine actors going silly for a change here are Paddy Considine, Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Edward Woodward, and Billie Whitelaw. (Yes, you will get to see the latter esteemed stage interpreter of Samuel Beckett brandishing a machine gun.)

Written by “Shaun’s” reteamed Pegg and director Edgar Wright, “Hot Fuzz” doesn’t go the usual post-“Airplane!” U.S. spoof route of piling on umpteen hit-or-miss gags and gratuitous movie references per minute. Instead, its humor is more sly and situational, but hilarious nonetheless. The makers have really done their homework in aping that Bruckheimer/Bay style where no door can be closed or footfall taken without a thunder-in-echo-chamber sound effect. Angel (Pegg out-pokerfacing even David Caruso) can’t even turn his head without a whoosh of epic Dolby Digital wind. The requisite hamfisted montages, gratuitous stunts and bloated FX are all duly present.

Some might complain the point is belabored at over two hours’ running time. But hey, if “Bad Boys 2” could be allowed to eat up even more of your life (146 minutes! of Michael Bay!!!) and umpteen tens of budgetary millions in expense, I’m more than willing to indulge Pegg & Wright — especially since their unnecessary-multiple-climaxes actually do get better as they proceed.

Besides, it’s not like what they’re parodying is going away. In fact, it seems to be more insufferably resilient than ever, with a 20-years-later “Rambo” sequel and the horrifically titled “Live Free or Die Hard” coming to a theater near you all too soon.

04.17.2007