Reviews: "Lady Chatterley;" "Manufactured Landscapes"

By Nick Pinkerton/indieWIRE and Michael Joshua Rowin/indieWIRE

Under the rainbow: Pascale Ferran’s “Lady Chatterley”

Showered with Cesar awards in its native France, Pascale Ferran’s “Lady Chatterley” faces a more uncertain fate stateside (Gallic awards committees can’t resist a pretty woman in a field of sun-kissed wildflowers; just ask Claude Berri). Though based on a version of D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned, “pornographic” final novel, it’s too restive and restrained to draw in the blithe, shock-hungry Terry Richardson/“9 Songs” contingent, too explicit for the AARP-discount crowd looking for a period romance that’ll act as a soothing tonic — and as for American critics, there’s never any shortage of twits eager to reenact the aesthetic skirmishes of 50 years past, “daring” to fatuously sneer at the sight of a petticoat.

[SF360 editor’s note: This Reverse Shot review was published originally in indieWIRE June 21, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this week.]

It’s a work that deserves more consideration, though it’s worth asking: Why another film of “Lady Chatterley” now? Lawrence’s story has been brought to the screen several times already – Lady Constance Chatterley (here played the half-British actress Marina Hands), neglected by her war-shattered, impotent husband, blows aside all social protocol to surrender to the caresses of their estate’s groundskeeper (a brusque Jean-Louis Coulloc’h). The answer: Regeneration through sex, in response to a world tormented by violence and class disparity, is a more relevant, and better, idea than most movies manage.

The 168-minute cut being released in theaters distills Ferran’s TV miniseries, shearing it of nearly an hour — in its present state, some referred — to plot points seem to have been left behind in the editing suite, but I didn’t mind; it sometimes feels superficially like a Maurice Pialat film (though without the insight into interclass sex seen in “Loulou”). A goodly amount of that still-imposing runtime is given over to copulation, the intimate documentation of Chatterley’s increasing comfort and satisfaction with her new lover; and though a note of drudgery sets in, the sex is good sex, shot and blocked with intelligence, relying on faces more than anything else to communicate Connie’s gradual expansion.

Lensed by Julien Hirsch, the florid passages of romantic-erotic idyll are suffused with bursting, blossoming, growing things, the passage of time referred to in ellipsis featuring handsome views of the Chatterley grounds in the raiment of the seasons. But there is no more instructive illustration of the difference between the pleasingly picturesque and the actually spiritual than that which comes in placing “Lady Chatterley” alongside another Francophonic imagination of the English countryside, Truffaut’s “Two English Girls,” which, as shot by Nestor Almendros, remains an invigorating gush of light and air. In fact, Ferran’s “Chatterley” comes off badly in almost any of the canonical comparisons it invites – to Lawrence, Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Jane Campion, among others – without ever establishing an identity unto itself. At times you might believe this cross-channel hybrid was entirely the product of the British film industry, in all of the worst ways. A distinct “almost… but not quite” air permeates all of the lovely, calendar-perfect fecundity, the performances as manicured as the grounds of a Normandy estate, the artfully timed fade-outs, the period-detailed, deftly staged scenes that flitter by, lacking for nothing except for a single thing to make them stick in the mind.

[Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer and editor and frequent contributor to Stop Smiling. Reprinted with permission, copyright Nick Pinkerton, indieWIRE 2007.]

The World at Large: Jennifer Baichwal’s “Manufactured Landscapes”

[SF360 editor’s note: This Reverse Shot review was originally published in indieWIRE June 7, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this week.]

Initially, Jennifer Baichwal’s “Manufactured Landscapes” recalls last year’s “Our Daily Bread.” A clinical crawl through a gargantuan Chinese factory – with its endless, evenly spaced stations of laborers glued to tedious tasks – hauntingly echoes similar tracking shots Nikolaus Geyrhalter used in his film to explore the lulling, mechanical uniformity of industrial food production. “Our Daily Bread” discovers otherworldly environments and depersonalized regiments behind the curtain of modern agricultural processes; “Manufactured Landscapes” investigates those of the entire world.

And since the most significant new player on the global stage at the moment is China, Baichwal wisely follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky – famed for his surveyor’s eye ability to bring out the unreality of mines, oil fields, and other landscape-changing undertakings – as he captures in precisely framed compositions the ravages upon urban and rural landscapes a rapidly developing nation has affected through destruction, pollution, waste, and aggressive dominance. Yet when Burtynsky isn’t providing the film’s vision through his work or his example, “Manufactured Landscapes” falls just short of finding its own voice.

Nevertheless, “Manufactured Landscapes” contains some remarkable material. One gets a sense of it from Burtynsky’s photography, which the film, as if turning the floor entirely over to him, often arranges in montage sequences preceded by the artist’s own voice-over explanations. A particular series of photographs demonstrates how during the last decade and a half of economic revitalization entire Chinese villages have gradually adapted themselves into recycling stations for electronic waste, with enormous heaps of wire and metal rummaged through by masked workers attempting to salvage reusable parts. It’s stunning evidence of a scavenger culture emerging from prosperity’s forgotten debris, even if it’s merely presented as a cinematic slideshow. Elsewhere in the film, as with the opening shot, her camera mimics Burtynsky’s cool, detached gaze, resulting in the most visually impressive moments – the standout being the world’s largest engineering project, the Three Gorges Dam (also the subject of Burtynsky-esque Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s new film, “Still Life”), transformed by the lens into a sentinel of earth-altering autonomy.

Toward film’s end “Manufactured Landscapes” looks at Burtynsky’s work on the gentrification of Shanghai and the gradual takeover of modern high-rises in an urban city forced to expand and efface its architecture. Here Baichwal loses sight of Burtynsky’s photography, interviewing a bourgeois real-estate agent clearly meant to serve as a subject of derision. This wrong move wouldn’t be worth pointing out if it didn’t seem so unnecessarily included at the expense of larger issues left untouched — does the beauty of Burtynsky’s work, for example, detract from a more urgent sense of the political meaning it invokes? Baichwal does a fine job bringing attention to Burtynsky and the issues which he in turn raises, but when it comes to picking up where Burtynsky leaves off, she’s only just begun.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Joshua Rowin, indieWIRE 2007.)]

topics: french cinema, political film, reviews

07.17.2007