The Great Movies III

The most mysterious characters in the film are, of course, the rich recluse Gorodish and his bold young friend Alba (this was the first of five films made byThuy An Luu).The characters are found in a series of popular French thrillers by Delacorta, including Diva, where we can learn that he is a musician, she is a fourteen-year-old wise beyond her years, their relationship is unconsummated, and she has a knack for bringing trouble home for him to solve, just as a cat will bring home a mouse, and just as she brings Jules to his lair. In a sense, you could say that Delacorta (real name Daniel Odier) was a co-inventor of the cinema du look, since his prose emphasizes slick surfaces, neon colors, unorthodox settings, and characters from the shadows. Here is an idea of his prose, from his 199o novel Alba: "He noticed on the white table a piece of paper adorned with Alba's lovely handwriting. Her practice of the Tao mysteries had made it as deliciously fluid as one of her inspired kisses, the one she called a dawn ottoman."

One peculiarity of the plot is that Beineix withholds much from the characters, but almost nothing from the audience. We know what both sides know, and the result is to focus our attention on the how rather than the why. The film is an "exercise in style," yes, but that need not be a criticism. We go to different films for different reasons, and Diva gives us such a sensuous flow of images that we enjoy the characters moving through them. Rousselot's camera itself sometimes seems governed by the images, rather than controlling them.

As the critic David Edelstein observes,"when the bicycle-messenger hero listens to Wilhelmenia Fernandez sing the aria from La Wally ... at that first sublime high note, the camera lifts off and begins to sway. Every time the aria is replayed, the camera moves at the same instant. It has to. This is style as a force of nature."

For Beineix (born 1946), Diva was a sensational start to what turned out to be a rather anticlimactic career. In 1984, he was back at Cannes with The Moon in the Gutter, which was booed, perhaps for its over-insistence on style; some shots were so elaborate or obviously concocted that they upstaged and even obscured their content. In 1986, he made the sensational Betty Blue, which became a huge success in France and still plays as a cult film, primarily, I am convinced, because of its generous nudity. Interestingly, in 1997 for the BBC, he made Locked-in Syndrome, a documentary about Jean Dominique Bauby (the subject of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

og Day Afternoon runs a little longer than the average feature, and you think maybe they could have cut an opening montage of life in New York. But no. These shots, stolen from reality, establish a bedrock for the film. It's "naturalistic," says the director, Sidney Lumet. I think he means it has the pace and feel of everyday life. When you begin with the story of a man who sticks up a bank to finance his lover's sex change, when you have a situation that has attracted hundreds of cops and millions of TV viewers, you run the risk of making a sideshow. Dog Day Afternoon never makes that mistake. The characters are all believable, sympathetic, convincing. We care for them. In a film about cops and robbers, there are no bad guys. Just people trying to get through a summer afternoon that has taken a strange turn.

It's an actor's picture. Lumet and his editor, Dede Allen, take the time to allow the actors to live within the characters; we forget we're watching performances. Although the movie contains tragedy and the potential for greater tragedy, it is also tremendously funny. But Frank Pierson's Oscarwinning screenplay never pauses for a laugh; the laughter grows organically out of people and situations. You can believe that even with hostages taken and firearms being waved around, such elements of human comedy would nevertheless arise.

One of the funny moments comes at the beginning, when three robbers enter a bank but one of them chickens out and says he can't go through with it. "Stevie," says his partner Sonny, "don't take the car." "But how am I gonna get home?" Stevie whines. Is that real? Yes, because you believe that Stevie would in fact have driven himself home and that Sonny (Al Pacino) would think of that.