Edinburgh Film Festival : pt.V (Sun 21 Aug) including Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ [7/10]

Published on: August 19th, 2005

a sniffy review of Emmanuel Carrere's THE MOUSTACHE [5/10] – seen at 9am
and a hot-off-the-press review of Joss Whedon's SERENITY [7/10] – seen at noon

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Of all the directors making their debuts at Edinburgh '05, one of the most promising – on paper at least – was best-selling French novelist/philosopher Carrere, whose admiring study of Philip K Dick (I Am Alive and You are Dead) has just been translated into English. The Dick influence isn't much evident, however, in what emerges as a Moustache of two distinct halves.

Strongly reminiscent of Jean-Claude Carriere's classic 1969 short La pince a ongles, and adapted from Carrere's own tome, it's the story of Parisian fortysomething Marc (Vincent Lindon). On a whim he decides to shave off his  moustache – only to be told by his wife (Emmanuelle Devos), friends and colleagues that he never had such a facial accoutrement.

Cue full-blown existential crisis et un general crackup: absorbing and even gripping up to the halfway point, which is when our hangdog hero really starts to lose the plot (along with his writer-director) and decamps to Hong Kong – presumably chosen because it's a city famous for having gone through its own severe crise d'identite. Over in the far east developments take on an increasinlgy arbitrary feel, allowing the air to rapidly escapes from what was always a somewhat delicate soufflé.

There's always a market for this kind of pseudo-philosophical, classily pretentious stuff, especially if it comes with a French label. For me, however, it ended up feeling, despite its many plus points, like a disappointing waste of everybody's valuable time – would anybody really notice if its existence was somehow suddenly, magically, erased?

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Prithee, landlubbers! 'Tis cathode-meister Whedon's debut feature Serenity, adapt'd from a shortliv'd, shamefully network-abort'd small-screen show of his own devising, entitl'd Firefly and much-belov'd among certain geeksome genre-hounds. And in which the dialogue is, one presumes, the same quaint, quasi-seventeenth-century patter much-spouted herein: "sundries" … "twixt my nethers" … "so here is us, on the raggedy edge" etc, etc. 

Crowdpleasing pic seems to these eyes rather like Terry Nation's much-missed, anti-heroic seventies BBC series Blake's 7 on a proper budget: main characters are a ragtag bunch of affectionately-bickering blokes-n-lasses gamely fighting the good fight against the dauntingly vast and well-armed Federation – sorry, Empire – sorry, Alliance. The hard-bitten (but perhaps soft-centred) 'Blake' figure is a swaggering, wisecracking Sean Bean-meets-Captain Kronos cove with the delightfully bank-managerish name of 'Malcolm Reynolds.' As Mal, flaxen-haired Nathan Fillion nabs most of the best lines – and he's clearly had plenty of practice with Whedon's whip-smart, cliche-twisting post-modern dialogue -more droll than sidesplitting, though quotable lines abound from start to finish (Mal dismisses God: "That's a long wait for a train don't come.")

Plot is the usual episodic, convoluted, somewhat confusing shenanigans: Reynolds and his crew on the Nostromo-ish battered spaceship (or rather 'boat') Serenity shield River (Summer Glau) a seemingly frail, sort-of-psychic teenage girl – think X-Men's Rogue meets Crouching Tiger's Jen - from the bad guys' evil clutches. All the while they must evade the marauding 'Reavers' (shouldn't that be 'reivers?') – grunting Orc/Ogronish nasties with a taste for live human flesh. The show (which you don't need to have seen beforehand – I hadn't) was apparently much more Western-inflected than the film. Aiming for a wide popcorn-multiplexy
audience, writer-director Whedon gleefully scrambles a multitude of genres into one big, smart-alecky-but-slam-bang-when-it-needs-to-be romp. 

It's superior, frightfully clever sci-fi by Hollywood standards, but anyone encountering Whedon properly for the first time here (like me) might wonder whether he quite justifies all the wild praise lavished on him by legions of Buffy/Angel/Firefly fanboys' (and girls'). Speedy two hours though it is, Serenity is unlikely to spark a stampede for Firefly DVDs – we aren't talking Starship Troopers here – though it probably will see a revival, in some form, of the TV show.

And the ultra-game cast deserve such an unexpectedly happy ending: in a tight ensemble, the eerily Laura-Dern-like Jewel Staite makes particular impact as winsome technician Kaylee, while and it's more than good to see Adam Baldwin back in feature-films as the hulking 'Gan' variant Jayne. Visiting Brit-baddie Chiwetel Ejiofor, meanwhile, makes an eminently hissable and classily silky-solemn ass-kicker as the unnamed 'Operative' … a tad more of a 'Travis' than a 'Servalan', for all ye Nation acolytes driftin' out there bemong "the vasty nothingness".

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Neil Young
21st/22nd August, 2005

* THE MOUSTACHE : [5/10] : La moustache : France 2005 : Emmanuel CARRERE : 86 mins : seen at Cameo cinema (press show)
* SERENITY : [7/10] : USA 2005 : Joss WHEDON : USA 2005 : 117 mins : seen at Cineworld (press show). World premiere is at this year's EIFF!

Edinburgh International Film Festival

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