| for this week's Tribune : 'Bright Star' and 'Jennifer's Body' [both 6/10] |
|
|
 Bright Star director : Jane Campion Jennifer's Body director : Karyn Kusama Arriving on our screens barely a couple of weeks after Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker departed them, Bright Star and Jennifer's Body are further welcome examples of respected female directors taking steps on the "comeback" trail. New Zealand's Jane Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, and only the second to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, with The Piano (1993). Her next three films - The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003) - were progressively more tepidly received, and while the latter was unfairly maligned, so hostile was the reception to that ambitious Meg Ryan-starring psychological thriller that more than half a decade has elapsed before this, her next feature. Keats biopic Bright Star premiered to largely enthusiastic reviews at the Cannes film festival earlier this year, and though the film left the Croisette prizeless, it's already been touted as a major contender for Academy Awards and, in particular, BAFTAs (the latter invariably looking fondly on high-end prestige costume-dramas.) August prizes are most unlikely to head the way of teen-horror/comedy Jennifer's Body, although its scriptwriter Diablo Cody did pick up the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (14 years after Campion won the same category) for her previous effort Juno (2007). A decidedly commercial proposition (on paper at least), with starlet du jour Megan Fox - from the Transformers franchise - in the title role, Jennifer's Body (named after a rather fine album-track by Courtney Love's perennially-underrated band Hole) proved a surprising bellyflop at the US box office this summer. It nevertheless represents an upturn in the fortunes of its director, Brooklyn's Karyn Kusama. Kusama was hailed as one of the most exciting new voices in independent American cinema after her terrific 2000 debut Girlfight, then she came a right cropper when taking Hollywood's shilling for ill-advised sci-fi action-picture Aeon Flux (2005), essentially a vehicle for the (then-)recently Oscar-garlanded Charlize Theron. In Jennifer's Body she displays workmanlike competence with a different kind of "genre" subject, albeit with a similar kind of distaff twist. As related in voice-over and via flashback by nice-girl protagonist "Needy" (Mamma Mia! alumna Amanda Seyfried) - whom we discover incarcerated in a mental hospital for unspecified misdeeds (unreliable-narrator alert) - it's the latest cinematic version of what Kathy Acker called 'blood and guts in high-school.' Needy explains how her best-pals-since-childhood friendship with brunette bombshell Jennifer (Fox) was tested, and then some, when the latter became victim of demonic possession and turned bloodthirstily homicidal. Having Jennifer's hair go lank and skin blotchy in between murderous sprees is signal of Cody and Kusama's not-so.subtle allegorical intent (drug-dependency and/or the self-image problems of a campus "man-eater.") And the concept of jock-slaying succubus teen-queen as a 21st-century variant on 'Countess Dracula' is an appealing one - 'assault and Bathory', if you like. But while there's no shortage of idea or smartness in what looks at first glance like disposable multiplex fodder, the picture struggles to reconcile its horrific and humorous content - scoring much more heavily on the latter front (all the stuff involving the Satan-worshipping rock-band is a hoot) than the former. And while Cody's trademarked hipster dialogue never quite grates on the ear in the same unbearable way it so often did in Juno, it's still the kind of self-consciously quirky verbiage that works much better on the page than it does on the screen. The same is true, albeit in a rather different context, regarding the poems of John Keats - in fact, it's hard to think of many films which have transferred poetry and poets, especially the romantics, to big or small screen without falling back on starving-genius cliches or shots of fey chaps peering soulfully into clouds, lakes and flora. Bright Star avoids many of the sub-genre's pitfalls, focussing on a relatively short period in Keats's relatively short life, namely his flirtation, courtship and passionate relationship (unconsummated?) with Fanny Brawne, a young woman of higher social standing. As played by the very capable Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, the introvert Keats and convention-questioning Fanny make for an appealing study-in-contrasts twosome, especially when the pair are circling each other with cautious semi-formality - at such junctures the emphasis is very much on Fanny's status as a creative, capable individual in her own right (she designs and makes her own clothes). It's unfortunate that as her love for Keats - already something of a precocious celebrity in London literary circles - develops, she regresses into something of a lovesick teenager. In addition, the pair's social and economic context is only cursorily sketched in, Campion being much more interested in crafting transcendent grace-note scenes of a shimmery, Terrence Malick-ish intensity. The film does manage to make events of 200 years ago feel vividly alive, although not quite to the extent that it achieves its evident aim of breathing new life into the ever-restricted world of the bonnets-and-breeches picture - the straitening need to follow established biographical facts, within the now firmly-entrenched limitations of this subgenre, proving something of a recurring hindrance in this regard. As her own heroine also learns, the prosaic bounds of convention are more unyielding rigid than they initially seem. Neil Young 27th October, 2009 written for the 4th November issue of Tribune magazine  BRIGHT STAR : [6/10] : UK(/Aus/Fr) 2009 : Jane CAMPION : 119m (BBFC) : seen 3rd October 2009, Empire cinema, Great Park, Birmingham (press show - 62nd CinemaDays event). [16/28] JENNIFER'S BODY : [6/10] : US 2009 : Karyn KUSAMA : 102m (BBFC) : seen 2nd October 2009, Empire cinema, Great Park, Birmingham (press show - 62nd CinemaDays event). [17/28] |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
