amedia

We get a free movie from Jaman nearly every week, and we watched a couple of them fairly close together. I was pretty sure I knew which of the two we'd like better. One was a French suspense film involving computer-company espionage, supposed to be like a Hitchcock thriller; the other was a drama about people gathering for a funeral. Give me a thriller over a soap opera any day, right? Boy, was I wrong!

A Model Employee (Une employée modèle) (2002) was tiresome and murky, possibly the most boring so-called thriller I've ever watched. Even though I didn't much like the last Hitchcock film I watched, it still had a crispness and clarity that was entirely absent here. The hero wasn't particularly likable, the mystery girl lacked the air of mischief that made someone like Amanda on Highlander or Ellen Tigh on the early years of the new BSG enjoyable, and the software-piracy plot was made especially confusing by the fact that several of the programmers (one of whom was trying to betray the company, one of whom was refusing to, one of whom didn't do anything) looked alike. I rather liked the Marxist policeman, who wearily introduced himself as "Commissaire Bovary - yes, like the novel by Flaubert" (obviously to head off questions he'd heard far too many times), but even his role wound up being ridiculously implausible. Oh, and apparently there are no people of color in Normandy, and no female executives or programmers, either.

Lawless Heart (2001) takes place during and after the funeral of a gay man in a small town, filmed partly in Essex and partly on the Isle of Man. Three overlapping and intersecting segments each follow one person, beginning with the funeral and continuing on; you can tell when a new section starts because you go back to the funeral and start following a different person. There are a number of scenes that make more and more sense as you see what leads up to them and follows from them from different points of view, but I don't want to give the impression that the movie works because of a gimmick. It's a quiet, thoughtful, honest, human movie; TODS and I loved it.

Thanks to

bulleteyes, I now pay more attention to movie soundtracks than I used to. A Model Employee had a rather grandiose score with syrupy violins shouting "THIS IS ROMANTIC!" every time Francois and Florence spent time together. Lawless Heart had an understated, unintrusive score that felt just right with the movie.