Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Devil, La Danse, Love Crime, The Eclipse and Glorious 39

The irony of watch­ing a film in which shad­owy fig­ures from the Swedish gov­ern­ment lie, steal and murder in order to dis­cred­it a journ­al­ist try­ing to reveal embar­rass­ing secrets, in the same week that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was accused of rape by a Swedish pro­sec­utor wasn’t lost on this review­er. Sadly, that was the only pleas­ure to be found watch­ing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, num­ber three in the Millenium tri­logy that star­ted in 2009 with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

This film picks up almost imme­di­ately after the pre­vi­ous epis­ode fin­ished and you may be sur­prised to dis­cov­er that pretty much every­one you thought was dead turns out to be still alive and mak­ing mis­chief. Feisty Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is stuck in hos­pit­al recov­er­ing from her injur­ies while dour journ­al­ist Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and his mates do their investigatin’.

And there’s your first prob­lem, right there. The most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter doesn’t do any­thing in this film and is barely an agent in her own redemp­tion – unsat­is­fy­ing storytelling plus mech­an­ic­al plot res­ol­u­tions and alto­geth­er too much talk­ing make Hornets’ Nest a big disappointment.

The open­ing night film of the recent Italian Film Festival, Many Kisses Later by Fausto Brizzi, has returned for a lim­ited release and big sooks could do a lot worse than shed a soppy tear at this port­manteau of vari­ous inter-connected romances – it’s manip­u­lat­ive but effect­ive if you’re in the right mood. There were a few cheers at the Festival screen­ing when a cent­ral char­ac­ter moved to Wellington (“Middle Earth!”) only for cheers to be replaced by stunned silence when our fair city was por­trayed in unlikely fash­ion by Cape Town. Bizarre.

Kristin Scott Thomas refines her icy per­sona a little in the French thrill­er Love Crime, writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Alain Corneau and com­pleted just before his untimely death from lung can­cer. Scott Thomas plays a top exec­ut­ive of a French sub­si­di­ary of an American multi-national. What they make or sell is not import­ant though, because the board­room set­ting is only there to provide the set-up for a murder mys­tery in which sup­posedly mousy 2IC Ludovine Sagnier (Swimming Pool) takes her revenge after years of humiliation.

Not a who­dun­nit then, more like a will­she­get­away­with­it. Preposterous plot­ting, poor work by Sagnier and under­stand­ably dis­trac­ted dir­ec­tion from Corneau mar Love Crime. You can do bet­ter than this if you look hard enough.

And if hor­ror is your thing you can do a lot worse than Devil, the first of a new series spring­ing “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan”. It’s a pity that after recent fias­cos like The Happening Shyamalan’s per­son­al brand is in such dis­ar­ray because former fans of his will find a lot to enjoy here. Devil is very cap­ably dir­ec­ted by John Erick Dowdle (who made the US remake of [REC] last year) and a simple idea is executed with wel­come lack of pre­ten­sion. Six strangers are trapped togeth­er in a broken elev­at­or. One by one they each meet a grisly demise and the ques­tion is: why them?

If you look hard enough you can find a super­nat­ur­al story of a dif­fer­ent kind at the Penthouse: Irish ghost story The Eclipse is set dur­ing a loc­al lit­er­ary fest­iv­al. Widower Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) is a high school wood­work teach­er, a volun­teer at the Festival and may just be los­ing his mind. When he meets the author of a well-known ghost story (Iben Hjelle) a tent­at­ive romance begins but so does the weird­ness. Good char­ac­ter work from Hinds, most often the second banana in films like There Will Be Blood, plus a con­cen­tra­tion on char­ac­ter from writer-director Conor McPherson raise The Eclipse above the ordinary.

Incidentally, Conor McPherson made one of my favour­ite unsung films – The Actors (2003) which starred Michael Caine and Dylan Moran as hope­less Dublin thespi­ans pre­tend­ing to be organ­ised crim­in­als. Seek it out.

Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39 is also very hard to find. I tracked it down at the second attempt, screen­ing in the Lighthouse’s cute little ten seat theatre. If I was ever build­ing a home cinema for myself it might look a lot like Lighthouse Cinema 5, but I digress. Glorious 39 takes a round­about way of look­ing at the British rul­ing classes res­ist­ance to the idea of war with Hitler – either because they had lived through WWI and wanted no repeat of the hor­ror, or for more sin­is­ter reasons.

Imagine if the Mitford sis­ters hadn’t just been slightly delu­sion­al Nazi sym­path­isers but were as power­ful as Bond vil­lains and you get an idea about Poliakoff’s con­spir­acy tale. For an inter­est­ing story, though, it just takes too long to get where it is going and the two hours run­ning time felt an awful lot longer.

Leaving the best until last, I hope you are still read­ing: Frederick Wiseman is a legendary doc­u­ment­ary maker who made his name back in 1967 with Titicut Follies, a lacer­at­ing expos­ure of con­di­tions at the Massachusetts Institution for the Criminally Insane. His per­cept­ive eye and under­stated edit­ing are unmatched in mod­ern doc­u­ment­ary and he has now turned his atten­tion to anoth­er kind of mad­ness, the world of ballet.

La Danse is about a year in the life of the Paris Opera Ballet, reputed to be the finest in the world and I don’t doubt it. Extended scenes of incred­ibly gif­ted people rehears­ing and per­form­ing, inter­cut with vign­ettes of admin­is­tra­tion and com­pany life, are often extraordin­ar­ily beau­ti­ful but at two and a half hours one or two of the sequences might have been saved for the DVD extras. While the primary sub­ject is the cre­ation of the art, Wiseman’s undi­min­ished social aware­ness allows him to quietly (and dev­ast­at­ingly) observe that the only non-white faces you see in the entire com­pany are clean­ing theatres, paint­ing walls or serving food.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 15 December, 2010.