The Infinite Happiness

Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

 

THE INFINITE HAPPINESS             B    
aka:  The Infinite Contentment

France  Denmark  (85 mi)  2015  d:  Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine   Official Website

While this is an architecture documentary on Copenhagen's “8 House,” a sleek, ultramodern design by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels of an eight-shaped house filled with glass windowed apartments for 500 residents that is as notable for the unique look and shape of the building, but the Danish and French filmmakers spent 21 days living on the premises to get a better feel of the effect it has on the residents living there.  Rather than focus on explaining the structure of the building and its technical details, instead the filmmakers offer us a glimpse inside, creating a more intimate experience of how it is viewed as “home.”  Going through a series of short vignettes, the film offers portraits of some of the many residents (and their pets) living there, each introduced by title, with colored highlights clearly indicating what portion of the building is being featured.  While one resident can’t speak glowingly enough about the “mad genius” that created this living experience, cocktail in hand, suggesting there is nowhere else like it in the world.  As if to prove it, we witness one man traverse the connected loop of all nine floors on a unicycle, where his skill at making some especially sharp turns is impressive, suggesting there is a certain joy and unique freedom simply by moving about the structure itself, while in another incident, we watch a mailman attempt to deliver a package, quickly getting lost, having to return to the spot of origin and trying again, scrutinizing a map on the ground level.  It’s almost as if the address numbers are in a code that needs to be broken, as they are not simply listed by floor.  Later we see a local deli make these gigantic bacon cheeseburgers with the works, where a kid is seen making an immediate delivery, but he’s even more confounded than the mailman, literally getting lost in a labyrinthian maze of wrong turns and blocked exits, becoming an absurd expression of utter futility.  As we watch a Pilate’s class in session, where the natural daylight brightness adds something cheerful to the workout experience, everyone has an open view of the outdoors, where you almost don’t feel like you’re “inside.”  The building is surrounded by a flat expanse, where there is a fenced-in herd of sheep nearby, also a small lake next to the building, offering fabulous views for fortunate residents, where we see a stream of perfectly decorated, Architecture Digest style rooms, both living rooms and bedrooms, whose main feature is the extraordinary view overlooking the lake, once again accentuating the natural splendor of the outdoors as seen from the inside.   

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this film is the witty choices of music, where there’s a clever, tongue-in-cheek irony associated with nearly every one, a touch of whimsy, where music plays a humorous counterpoint, where we listen to the familiar refrains from Carmen as we’re being introduced to a playful dog with a toy in his mouth, continually dropping it at the feet of the cameraman, then making a mad dash after it, happily retreating with the toy in his mouth, faithfully dropping it each time, and as the cameraman moves back, the dog scoops up the toy and brings it back to his feet, becoming a ritualized dance between man and animal that has cuteness written all over it.  Serving coffee on a patio outdoors, we are introduced to a successful middle-aged career woman who travels frequently, indicating she has a home in Juvet (home of the Juvet Landscape Hotel, The Hotel - Juvet, an utterly spectacular Norwegian hotel that is one of the architectural wonders of the world, featured as the Alaskan home in the recent film Ex Machina), but needed another home close to the Copenhagen airport that she could use primarily as an office.  Over time, however, she found herself spending more of her time here, which she attributes to the social architecture aspects of the building, which encourages communal living, greeting neighbors regularly, as you can’t leave your home without at least recognizing them.  Residents don’t even lock their doors, as they trust everyone, feeling no fear of break-ins, as crime is apparently not a factor in their lives.  We see a piano tuner, a man that restores old pianos by rebuilding them literally one key at a time, where we only learn afterwards that he’s blind.  There’s an amusing sequence showing the arrival of a handyman, one of the retired residents in the building who is always on call, offering his services (for free) in the spirit of being helpful, as he has the tools and wherewithal to fix things that are broken, while also feeling generous with his time.  We see him easily drill a hole in a cement wall in order to hang a picture, but the homeowner is such a klutz he can’t figure out how to hang the picture, fumbling around for a minute or two before he finally gets it.     

Of course animals are always popular, where we see a gorgeous white furry cat that seems to have the run of the place, as there are easily accessible gardens leading to an open field, so there are plenty of grounds to explore.  This particular cat eyes an easy target hiding in the shrubs and darts after it, returning back to the sidewalk, bird in mouth, and promptly gulps the whole thing down right on camera, leaving only a feather hanging out of its mouth before scurrying back to the apartment complex, running up and down stairs, turning corners, seemingly wandering endlessly before finally entering a little cat door of his home.  While the residents are obviously financially successful, there is a mix of older and younger, where one of the best features in the film is capturing the joyous lives of children (as perhaps only the French can do so well).  We see them in class painting pictures, following several as they are just developing some ideas before then seeing the final product on display, a bright and colorful array of youthful optimism.  Next they all gather together, faces painted and decorated, for a Halloween-style scavenger hunt, following clues provided of an escaped mad goblin on the loose, but is still lurking nearby, so their goal is to find him.  It’s a sight to behold to see them scampering around the premises, running with a reckless abandon, screaming at the top of their lungs, where they are clearly excited by this game.  But just a few moments later, one of the adult leaders of the hunt has to reassure them that the ghosts and goblins aren’t real, that she made them up for this game to play, as they were petrified they were going to be eaten, or something terrible was going to happen to them.  The children are delightful and they are beautifully captured by the filmmakers.  In contrast, we visit a couple living in a penthouse suite at the top, offering supreme views of the vast expanse.  But he’s troubled, on the verge of a heart attack, claiming he has to deal with the rudeness of tourists who routinely break into his private outdoor deck to take photos, arriving in tour buses, ignoring the keep out signs (written in three languages), stepping over the locked chain to block his view while invading his privacy, claiming his security camera has captured over 1400 invaders in just two months.  So apparently all is not bliss and infinite happiness remains a dream as yet unrealized by those at the top. 

Headhunters (Hodejegerne)

HEADHUNTERS (Hodejegerne)          B             
Norway  Germany  (100 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Morten Tyldum           Official site

Another Scandinavian thriller, following the success of the 3-movie Dragon Tattoo adaptations of the highly popular Stieg Larsson Swedish Millennium Trilogy, all released in 2009, which raised heads in America for its contemporary slant on investigative journalism, a smart crime drama creating such vividly memorable lead characters, introducing the punkish computer hacker Lisbeth Salander with a near photographic memory, initially played by Noomi Rapace, but also Michael Nyqkvist playing the award winning journalist, where the unique interest in their personal interplay was at least as interesting as the historical backdrop of murders and atrocities they were exploring.  The Nordic crime fiction phenomenon has been gathering plenty of momentum over the last decade or so with a steadily increasing proportion of books from Scandinavia and Iceland.  Now that Larsson has passed away, Norwegian Jo Nesbø is being touted as the next big thing, where this film adaptation has the feel of filling a void in the marketplace, with Millennium's Swedish producer Yellow Bird also handling this production, where much of it rivals the cool veneer of murder mysteries behind the Iron Curtain, but HEADHUNTERS is a Norwegian take on the crime thriller, a slick, stylish, high octane screen version that may take a page out of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s recent film Drive (2011), which is a highly entertaining mixture of commercial and art motif.  The past few years have featured several excellent Norwegian films, from the dark absurdity of Jens Lien’s THE BOTHERSOME MAN (2006), the amusing crime genre of Hans Petter Moland’s A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (2010), Joachim Trier’s impressionistic portrait of blossoming and then fading youth in Reprise (2006), also his devastating portrait of existential anguish in Oslo, August 31 (2011), to a hilariously offbeat teen comedy of Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen).  Those are all better films than this one, but one feature they all have in common is a core of excellent ensemble actors, many of whom are complete unknowns in America.  

Straightaway, a narrator offers a few acerbic and supposedly enlightened comments, where the subject is money and how it takes lots of it to maintain the girl of his dreams, living in a fabulously upscale Architecture Digest style modern home with glass windows all around.  The narrator is a diminutive Askel Hennie as Roger Brown, attempting to shed light on how he maintains his sanity, perhaps overcompensating for his lack of size, pretending to be a corporate headhunter in order to lead the life of luxury to which he’s accustomed, happily married to a gorgeous woman, a leggy blond ice princess, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), where he keeps his real profession a secret, as he’s a professional art thief.  Immediately Alfred Hitchcock’s TO CATCH A THIEF (1955) with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly comes to mind, where Roger even dons a similar all-black attire when he becomes a cat burglar, breaking into heavily guarded premises and exchanging indistinguishable looking facsimiles for original works of art, where the owners never even realize anything’s been stolen.  No sooner does the audience meet this fabulously rich and wealthy couple, who have a bit of a marital tiff, but Roger flies out the door in a hastily arranged meeting with his partner, having overheard his wife, the owner of a successful art gallery, mention the whereabouts of an original Rubens painting worth perhaps $100 million dollars that was supposedly stolen during the war.  Like catnip to a cat, Roger is immediately on the prowl, but his partner Ove (Eivind Sander), the crack security specialist with a weakness for guns and Russian prostitutes, can’t peel his eyes away from the tantalizingly voluptuous Natasha (Valentina Alexeeva), not even for an instant, and has to be dragged into the caper.  The contrast between the two women, both seemingly bought and paid for, is not lost on the viewer, though they each seem to come from opposite social classes.  Tying everything together, so to speak, is the owner of the painting, a ruggedly handsome Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, yes – that’s Dutch), a former special ops mercenary soldier whose specialty is tracking people down, whose suave and sophisticated manner makes him an ideal candidate to fill an open CEO position at Roger’s company, Pathfinder, an international firm that specializes in cutting edge GPS technology. 

Complicating matters even further, Roger is having an affair with Lotte (Julie Ølgaard), which he cuts off, realizing the havoc it could play on his now hanging by a thread marriage, and when he steals the painting, which supposedly goes off without a hitch, he discovers his wife’s phone in the bedroom, suggesting his wife is having an affair of her own.  Putting the clamps down on Greve’s ascension to head corporate honcho changes the playing field, as from this point on Roger the corporate headhunter suddenly finds himself alone and among the hunted, where Clas, the professional tracker, is perpetually on his tail.  Both are idealized representations of corporate masculinity, the kind of guys that always make the other guys sweat while they walk away holding all the power and a suitcase filled with money.  Roger’s pecking order in his overly controlled world is under constant threat, where seemingly nonstop action sends him spiralling into the depths of one disaster after another, where suddenly it’s his life that hangs on a thread, continually squirming out of near death experiences.  There are casualties along the way that he is being blamed for, as two can play this secret con game of falsifying evidence, sending him on a nightmarish journey with seemingly no one left that he can trust, as literally everyone’s been somehow tainted by Clas in this subterfuge operation, leaving him no way out.  The thrills and spills border on the ludicrous at times, but the sadistic joy with which this director apparently relishes shattering the illusion of a James Bond style competency, continually dispatching his protagonist to undergo a succession of the most extreme and awkwardly humiliating circumstances, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, taking a slightly demented, almost Coen Brothers tone of sarcastic delight in his misery.  Conceiving this as a black comedy is perhaps the cleverest trick of the film, adding an underlying stylistic dimension of villainy even in the protagonist himself, where it’s not such an easy to understand black and white world, as we’re led to believe in advertising, but a ruthlessly hypocritical and amoral corporate con game of presenting a smooth surface in order to conceal the savage treachery going on underneath.  Tyldum chooses to delve under the surface at interior motives that have existed all along, but were all too quickly overlooked during the frantic pace of the action.  This doesn’t have the historical depth or the richness of character of the Millennium Trilogy, but is instead something of a breezy, lightweight entertainment vehicle designed to give the audience a highly charged thrill ride.     

Haywire

HAYWIRE                  B                     

USA  (93 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Steven Soderbergh

While Gina Carano will not make anyone forget about Jennifer Lopez as Karen Sisco in OUT OF SIGHT (1998), she may be a logical extension of her badass personality, though never reaching the elevated Pam Grier echelon.  In fact, rather than accentuate her feminine traits, she comes across as just one of the guys, a former marine/private contractor/mercenary hired for delicate operations where the best in the business is desired.  She can be counted on for her intelligence, discretion, and thorough nature, where she leaves no loose ends behind.  It doesn’t hurt that she’s also gorgeous.  Soderbergh, with his second release in the past 6 months, has hinted on retirement after wrapping up these last few films, but his signature stylization is all over this film, a sleek, fast paced action thriller that easily moves to various on-location sites around the world, where from the opening sequence Carano continually fights her way out of jams, with the pulsating, jazzy soundtrack by David Holmes.  In fact, it would fit nicely with the international globetrotting themes of the memory challenged but ballsy action of the BOURNE Trilogy (2002 – 2007), but since it shares a similar actor in Antonio Banderas, the film it likely compares to is Brian de Palma’s FEMME FATALE (2002), featuring model/actress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in an action role, where De Palma wipes the mat with the alluring sexuality, body doubles, and a much more intricate and complicated web of deceit, an homage to Hitchcock that was off-the-wall entertaining.  This film pales in comparison, largely because Carano never explores the sex factor and tellingly doesn’t attempt much complicated dialogue or acting interaction, instead she can be counted on for terrific ass kicking sequences, more in line with her brief career as a mixed martial arts star, formerly seen as Crush in the American Gladiators (2008) television series.   

Even Tarantino, or Russ Meyer for that matter in FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965), have fun mixing female action with clever or humorous dialogue, but despite a B-movie script from Lem Dobbs who wrote Soderbergh’s best film, THE LIMEY (1999), there isn’t a trace of memorable dialogue here.  While entertaining, to be sure, this is not heady stuff, despite surrounding Carano with some of the top actors working today, where it’s likely to be a split decision as to how well she pulls it off.  The fight scenes were overseen by Aaron Cohen, a specialist in providing counter-terrorism training to the U.S. military.  From an opening restaurant scene gone wrong that recalls PULP FICTION (1994), Soderbergh introduces a flashback sequence where Carano pulls off a hostage rescue operation in Barcelona with the guy she’s beating the crap out of in the restaurant (Channing Tatum), where they worked successfully as partners with no hitches, but suddenly her team has inexplicably turned against her, which she discovers in another highly suspicious undercover operation in Dublin with Michael Fassbender, as she moves invisibly through a world of espionage, double agents, government cover ups, and secret identities.  Never trusting anyone, she develops a secret sense, but unlike so many of the other action movies, she doesn’t seem like a super hero, as she gets hit frequently and knocked down, even smashed against walls and windows, but she has a way of sustaining the battle until she gains the upper hand, where her action sequences look real instead of choreographed and computer enhanced.  She’s an interesting figure, running through the gamut of men in this movie, but something of a lone wolf, where the double crosses by the employers in her line of business, namely Ewen McGregor and Antonio Banderas, have a way of playing themselves out, where she has to sit tight and make her move when they least suspect it.

 

Even Michael Douglas, looking more like his father’s gruff intensity as he ages, is another player on the scene who has to cut his losses and regroup due to unexpected backroom deals that eventually lead them to the Santa Fe desert home of Carano’s father, Bill Bixby, a former marine who is not easily fooled by all this monkey business.  It’s a beautiful home with a stunning landscape, another glass-windowed, Architectural Digest pick, like the spectacular Big Sur home on the edge of the woods overlooking the ocean in THE LIMEY.  But for all the meticulous detail prevalent in Soderbergh films, the rooftop chase sequences, her miraculous escapes, the brilliant locales, the alternating time sequences, the upper tier cast of characters, the mano a mano fight to the finish on the beach, and even a steady hand behind the camera that doesn’t resort to handheld movement to capture the physicality of mood, which is instead captured by the natural grace of Carano’s fight sequences, all of this overshadows the lack of interior character, which was the biggest selling point of Terence Stamp in THE LIMEY, as he was a man driven to do the impossible.  Not so here, as Carano is simply a well-trained professional that gets double crossed, something that happens all the time in the give and take of international power struggles, corporate takeovers, and government corruption.  This heavy style over substance is the ultimate undoing of the film, though it’s perfectly enjoyable, just not particularly memorable, unless, of course, you're a teenage fanboy who prefers watching this over playing video games, where the director is attempting to tap into the YouTube generation.  Oh, and Soderbergh has 3 more films lined up in post production—so much for retirement—at least none of them are in 3D.