In one of the odder scenes in “Luther,” a disjointed new historical drama,
Joseph Fiennes fires off one rim-shot line after another about the Catholic
Church. “Eighteen out of 12 disciples are buried in Spain,” cracks the droll
monk to a roomful of roaring theology students.
In a roller-coaster role, Fiennes is glibly self-assured one moment, poised
on the brink of nervous breakdown the next and charismatically commanding the
next. It’s to the credit of this intently focused actor (”Shakespeare in
Love”) that he finds as much of a coherent through-line as he does in Camille
Thomasson and Bart Gavigan’s script.
Fiennes is admirable throughout. He captures the bone-deep conviction of
Luther’s beliefs, his anguish at turning against Rome and the power of genuine
humility in the face of a duplicitous institution.
His scenes with Bruno Ganz, excellent as a sympathetic Augustinian friar,
are deeply, affectionately felt. Luther’s confrontations with church and state
officials have a wooden solemnity, but even here Fiennes finds the authentic,
hair-trigger humanity. His huge eyes and broad mouth register Luther’s storms
of eloquent outrage and guardedly dawning sense of hope.
When it comes to heart-tugging encounters with a child unable to walk, or
Luther’s romance with an ex-nun (Claire Cox), perfunctorily handled at the end
of the two-hour film, even Fiennes can’t find a handhold. “Luther” would have
been more satisfying with some of its dutiful narrative trimmed away.
Director Eric Till, whose credits include “All Things Bright and Beautiful”
and “Bonhoffer: Agent of Grace,” fills out his broad, under-realized canvas
with several big-name supporting roles. Peter Ustinov twinkles with laconic
merriment as Prince Frederick the Wise, a Luther sympathizer. A jowly Albert
Molina hawks indulgences like snake oil to the peasant masses.
For all its scope and detail, “Luther” fails to convey the sense of history
moved by a compelling individual. When Fiennes wanders through scenes of human
carnage unleashed by his ideas, there’s a sense of formality and disconnection.
Convincing as this Martin Luther may be, he never quite seems to live and
breathe in a world he’s so radically changing.
- This film contains disturbing images of violence.
– Steven Winn
‘TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI’
Crime thriller. Starring Jean Gabin and Jeanne Moreau. Directed by Jacques
Becker. Written by Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe and Albert Simonin. (Not
rated. 94 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Castro through Oct. 2.)
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No one embodied world-weary elegance more gracefully than Jean Gabin, the
French film star of “Pepe le Moko” and “Grand Illusion.” Before Bogie, before
Mitchum, before Sinatra, Gabin exuded a cool fatalism that hinted at
intimations of tenderness and sensitivity beneath the crust.
In “Touchez Pas au Grisbi,” a classic policier from 1953, Gabin plays Max
le Menteur. An aging, aristocratic gangster with a thickening waistline, Max
lifts $50 million in gold bullion from Orly airport — intending to ditch the
crook’s game and retire in style. Forty-nine when he made the film, stuck in a
career slump, Gabin played Max with such sad, knowing wisdom that he
experienced a major comeback.
There’s nothing remarkable in the plot of “Touchez Pas,” which opens today
at the Castro in a sparkling print with new subtitles. Max and Riton, his
“poor sap” of a colleague, pull off the ultimate heist. Retirement beckons,
but when Riton’s floozy girlfriend (Jeanne Moreau) rats him out to her young,
heroin-dealer lover (Lino Ventura), plans for all that gorgeous grisbi (the
loot) start to fade.
The magic here is all in the telling: in the graceful, laconic direction of
Jacques Becker (”Casque d’Or”) and the subtle interplay of Max and his
underworld cronies. It’s in the dreamy vision of nocturnal Paris, and the
gentle manner in which Max upbraids Riton for spilling the beans to his two-
timing amour.
Gabin, voted “actor of the century” in an end-of-the-millennium French poll,
is perfection here. Like Spencer Tracy, the actor to whom he was was often
compared in his time, Gabin is so relaxed he barely seems to act at all.
It’s a joy to see him with Moreau, a sassy 25 at the time and still active
in films today. Their cinematic union, though unforeseen at the time, would
bridge the entire post-silent history of French film. – This film contains partial nudity, mild violence and raw language.
– Edward Guthmann
‘THE EMBALMER’
Drama. Starring Ernesto Mahieux and Valerio Foglia Manzillo. Directed by
Matteo Garrone. Written by Ugo Chiti, Matteo Garrone and Massimo Gaudioso.
(Not rated. 104 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. At the Lumiere.)
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The themes of “Death in Venice” — sexual obsession, longing for youth, the
power of beauty — permeate “The Embalmer,” a dark, unsettling drama from
Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone.
Peppino, played by Ernesto Mahieux, is a 50-year-old taxidermist and dwarf,
whose glad hand and boisterous laughter disguise the desperate loneliness of a
misfit. One day at the zoo, he befriends Valerio (Valerio Foglia Manzillo), a
tall, strikingly beautiful man who shares his interest in animals.
Valerio, a chef, quits his job to become Peppino’s apprentice, and soon
he’s enjoying an inflated paycheck and assorted gifts. He’s a dim bulb,
Valerio, and takes forever to realizes that Peppino’s grand overtures — the
ring, the dinners, the double dates with Roman hookers — are the sexual lure
of a lonely man.
Peppino lives large, his income enhanced by the Mafia don who hires him to
open corpses, stash drugs inside them, and sew them back up before they’re
shipped out of Italy. It takes Deborah (Elisabetta Rocchetti), a feisty, full-
lipped woman who takes up with Valerio, to expose Peppino’s game plan, to see
the manipulation beneath his let’s-be-buddies jocularity.
Mahieux, who won the Donatello Award for best actor in an Italian film,
builds a character so relentlessly powerful and creepy that “The Embalmer”
leaves an aftertaste — we can practically smell him. Garrone, like Mexican
director Arturo Ripstein, doesn’t spare us the macabre and the grotesque, but
draws us, deeper than we expect, into a very scary place.
The actors are perfectly cast, but “The Embalmer” takes too long to reach
its grim denouement, and tries too hard to make its points about the twisted,
renegade nature of unmet desire.
- This film contains violence, nudity, sex and raw language.
– Edward Guthmann
‘TAKING SIDES’
Drama. Starring Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgard. Directed by Istvan Szabo.
(Not rated. 105 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
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Wilhelm Furtwangler, one of the supreme conductors of the 20th century,
chose to remain in Germany during the Nazi regime, and when the war ended he
had to undergo a rigorous process of investigation before the Allies would
permit him to work again. “Taking Sides” dramatizes the interrogation of
Furtwangler, in an attempt to explore the obligation of artists in a
totalitarian society.
Because they intend the film to be a balanced account that leaves the
audience to decide the extent of Furtwangler’s complicity, the filmmakers must
pretend at an ambiguity surrounding Furtwangler that isn’t quite there. Though
no hero, it’s a fact that Furtwangler stuck his neck out to save the lives of
many Jews, and he never joined the Nazi Party. Though bestowed with honors by
the Nazi authorities, he refused to give the Nazi salute, and he steered clear
of politics.
The movie compounds this conceptual problem by placing, in opposition to
Furtwangler, not a reasonable Spencer Tracy-type interrogator, but an ugly
American — an uncultured clod who thinks overbearing rudeness is a form of
endearing informality. Ronald Harwood (”The Pianist”), adapting his own stage
play, gives the interrogator, an Army major, no serious points to make about
art and politics. In fact, he misunderstands most of Furtwangler’s replies.
The major can only taunt and badger.
As a result, the movie’s promise — to provide a balanced argument — goes
unrealized, and all we’re left with is the spectacle of an idiot bullying a
genius. Harvey Keitel’s performance as the smug, self-satisfied major is
terribly miscalculated, unless he intended for us to loathe the spectacle of a
small, stupid man glorying in his sudden power. That’s possible. Stellan
Skarsgard plays Furtwangler with an air of exhaustion that seems a generous
attempt to justify the script’s weakness, that the conductor doesn’t defend
himself vigorously enough. Of the two men, it’s the major who acts more like a
Nazi.
There’s only one moment of revelation and that comes by way of archival
footage, in which Furtwangler is seen shaking hands with Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels after a concert. The truth is in Furtwangler’s face,
a mask of placidness just barely concealing a hint of fear and an ocean of
contempt, a desire to remain reserved and a determination not to give offense.
The tension is unbearable.
- This film contains strong language and footage of Nazi atrocities.
– Mick LaSalle
‘TYCOON: A NEW RUSSIAN’
Drama. In Russian with English subtitles. Directed by Pavel Lounguine. (Not
rated. 128 minutes. At the Opera Plaza.)
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“We live in an age of rat charmers,” says the chief accountant of a corrupt
corporate criminal as she is interviewed by police after her boss’
assassination, her voice welling with regret. “Gorbachev was one, Yeltsin was
another.”
And Platon Makovsky, apparently, was the biggest Pied Piper of them all,
mixing the arrogant greed of an Enron executive with the calculating, cruel
violence of Tony Montana in “Scarface” in veteran Russian director Pavel
Lounguine’s “Tycoon: A New Russian.”
As ambitious and smoothly professional as its main character, “Tycoon” uses
a “Citizen Kane”-like structure to investigate the life and legacy of an
oligarch, an early-’90s phenomenon of post-communist Russia. But although
Lounguine has a lot to say about Russia’s struggle in its transition to global
capitalism, his film is strangely uninvolving, lacking dramatic sweep.
It is based in part on the most notorious oligarch of them all, Boris
Berezovsky, a meek mathematician in the Soviet era who bought into a car
dealership and rose, through largely illicit means, to amass a multibillion-
dollar fortune and help engineer Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election.
Although the real Berezovsky is in self-imposed exile in Britain after
current Russian President Vladimir Putin spearheaded a drive to prosecute the
oligarchs, Languine’s Platon Makovsky (played by a crisply handsome Vladimir
Mashkov) is assassinated in the first few minutes of the film, and those
investigating his death interview those who knew him to determine the killer.
There are a lot of enemies to sift through. As one interviewee intones,
“Behind every bastard there is another bastard,” and the film depicts several
of them through Platon’s rise from car dealer — he swindles a big automaker
by selling off its cars at a loss and keeping the money — to a womanizing
corporate tycoon surrounded by loyal bodyguards.
Mashkov has been making a name for himself in Hollywood — he had a major
supporting role in “Behind Enemy Lines,” the Owen Wilson-Gene Hackman action
flick — and he has smoldering magnetism. But Lounguine never lets him cut
loose; he’s too cool a customer — call him Godfather Lite.
No horse heads here — the closest thing “Tycoon” has to a memorable
sequence is late in the film when he shoots pool with a Yeltsin-like Siberian
politician he’s trying to bring into his fold. As he systematically beats him
game after game, Platon gets a flurry of cell phone calls from his right-hand
man, standing across the large room, whispering to him to lose a game here and
there.
Platon agrees each time as he clicks the “off” button on the cell phone,
then continues to win every game anyway. It’s a comic portrayal of
ruthlessness, and a rare foray into humor. If only the rest of Lounguine’s
film had put more pedal to the metal.
- There are several scenes of violence, brief scenes of sex with nudity.
– G. Allen Johnson ![]()
