FILM

Good for your health

Smoke
Dir: Wayne Wang

Anyone who likes a good story will love Smoke, which is a wonderful, surprising film all about friendships, families and secrets. It is hilarious and moving with a magically happy ending which cheers you up for days afterwards.
It is set in a Brooklyn neighbourhood surrounding a tobacco corner shop run by Auggie (Harvey Keitel). He's a streetwise father figure whose passionate hobby is to take a photograph every morning at 8 o'clock precisely from exactly the same position out on the pavement. He shows his vast documentary project to a regular customer Paul (William Hurt), a novelist who's had writers' block since his wife was shot dead in a random act of street violence. The two men begin a series of encounters with a whole number of mysterious and captivating people. Outstanding among these is Stockard Channing as Ruby. Her tragic tale is about love and grief and her crack addict daughter Felicity.
The film is so much about the male characters and their conflicts, it seems a sad inevitability that the women play such a supporting role. But Ruby shines out and it's a comfort when she ends up with the lucky mystery package whose journey through the film is a message of poetic justice.
Also remarkable is Forest Whittaker as Cyrus Cole. His portrayal of a man disabled by guilt but still open to transformation galvanises the film at its climax. After that moment all we want is for everyone to be happy again.
The story weaves in and out of danger. Death and abandonment are mishaps amid the indomitable humour and creativity which point to the constant potential of working class people, black and white, to cooperate. Issues like domestic violence, slum housing, learning disability, poverty and crime are thrown up in episodes of real slapstick and moments of comic intimacy. But the heart of the film is the lovability of the characters and their stories.
The final story is told through a haunting black and white sequence to a painfully affectionate song by Tom Waits called 'Innocent When You Dream'. Auggie tells Paul the tale of his most shameful act but the knowledge we gain is of his kindness and heroism.
See Smoke if you can and it will make you laugh and cry. Like Auggie, Paul, Ruby and all the others, it knows just how to press all the right buttons.
Nicola Field

Sophie's world

La Cérémonie
Dir: Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol made his reputation in the 1960s and 1970s with a series of films--Les Biches, Le Boucher, Juste Avant La Nuit--which skilfully exposed the murderous passions lurking beneath the elegant surface of French bourgeois life. In the past 20 years he had rather dropped from sight, but La Cérémonie represents his return to form.
Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is taken on as a maid by the Lelièvres, a wealthy industrialist (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and his wife (Jacqueline Bisset), living in a country house on the coast of Brittany. Though Sophie is almost totally uncommunicative--'I understand,' is her response to almost everything that's said to her--Madame soon proclaims her 'a pearl', so scrupulous is her housework.
But Sophie has two guilty secrets. One that she defends tenaciously is that she is illiterate. Every occasion when she is given a shopping list is a crisis. The other is that she may have murdered her father.
This helps to provide her with a bond with Jeanne, the clerk in the local post office (Isabelle Huppert), who was accused of killing her daughter but acquitted for lack of proof. Jeanne is energetic and discontented. She hates the Lelièvres and opens their mail. Soon the two women have formed an intense, intimate friendship.
One thing that unites them is hostility to the Lelièvres. The writer Richard Sennett coined the phrase 'the hidden injuries of class'. The couple don't treat Sophie particularly badly. In fact, they are self consciously 'good' employers.
But Chabrol shows brilliantly, through a series of minor incidents, the humiliation inherent in the relationship of master and servant. As her confidence grows thanks to her new friendship, Sophie becomes increasingly open in her defiance of the Lelièvres. Thus starts the events that leads to the film's violent climax.
Chabrol is a great admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and their films are often compared. But in Hitchcock's great films it is individual madness that drives the story on. Chabrol, however, is interested in class. He has called this 'the last Marxist film'. The antagonism that sets Sophie and Jeanne against the Lelièvres is social rather than psychological.
Is Chabrol celebrating a rebellion against class oppression? I'm not so sure. The Lelièvres with their bourgeois good taste--the climactic scene finds them sitting in their library, got up in full evening dress to watch a video of Mozart's Don Giovanni--are pretty ghastly. High culture is for them a form of conspicuous consumption. But what confronts them is almost the absence of any culture. Sophie's silence verges on the catatonic, as she uses her blaring television to shut out the world. As in his most explicitly political film, Nada, where nihilistic terrorists confront a ruthless French state, Chabrol seems to be presenting us with two equally unacceptable alternatives.
Alex Callinicos

A crowded marriage

French Twist
Dir: Josiane Balasko