
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
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It's been nine years since the release of "Sin City," a collaboration
between Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, with its dark crime-novel
heart, surreal visual style and some chewy performances by a cast game
to aim for the cheap seats. The style was lifted right out of Frank
Miller's books almost shot for shot in some cases; the books used as a
storyboard. "Sin City" was all gleaming car grilles and seedy bars and
tortured men lurching their way through the grim streets, casting
gigantic shadows. Mainly black-and-white, with red lips or green eyes
shining out of the monochrome, the film looked like a noir on acid, or a
grisly crime photo by Weegee, overexposed until black and white are
reversed. The voiceovers, weary and dispirited, came from the James M.
Cain flat-affect playbook. Some of the vignettes held together better
than others, but overall, it was hugely entertaining, an exercise in
style that pushed the envelope as hard as it could. It felt fresh. That
is not really the case now as "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" is more of
the same, basically, only now in 3-D, which adds some cool effects but
it's not really necessary.
Robert Rodriguez approaches the
material with the same enthusiastic vision that pulses off the screen,
each image tweaked for maximum drama. The cast, some re-creating their
roles from the first film (Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson,
Jamie King), and some new characters (played by Ray Liotta, Lady GaGa,
Christopher Meloni, Christopher Lloyd, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and more),
are all great, exhaling the hopelessness and desperation of living in a
city overtaken by sin.
The vignette-structure returns, with a
couple of additions written by Miller expressly for the film. At some
points the film lags, loses focus, especially in the segues between
vignettes where you can hear the gears creak. Thank goodness it's so
pretty to look at, and it is fun to count the references to classic
films. "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" starts with a snowy Saturday night
in Marv's brutal, haunted, and angry life (Mickey Rourke). He stops off
at the nudie bar to watch Nancy (Jessica Alba) dance, his anvil-shaped
head glowering out at the world. He breaks up an atrocity about to be
perpetrated in an alley by a bunch of preppy jerks. He has bouts of
amnesia. It's "same ol' same ol'" for poor lonely Marv.
Joseph
Gordon-Levitt appears in another vignette as Johnny, a reckless card
shark, determined to infiltrate a high-stakes poker game run by a
villainous senator (Powers Boothe, gloriously horrifying) with a shady
past and a taste for cruelty. Johnny is a whiz at cards, dealing them
out to the table with lightning-quick speed, astonishing everyone
present. Nobody wins against the senator. The senator will kill you if
you cross him. But Johnny will show him. It's personal.
"Nancy's
Last Dance" involves Alba's character haunted by the apparition of
Hartigan (Bruce Willis), staring at her from the back of the bar, a
protector still. Nancy is not doing well, drinking too much, crying in
her dingy apartment, hacking her hair off, her every thought starting to
swirl toward payback.
And finally, Eva Green enters the scene as
Ava Lord, the "dame to kill for" in the title. She is reminiscent of
every black widow woman from every film noir ever made: Lana Turner
wrapping John Garfield around her little finger in "The Postman Always
Rings Twice" or Barbara Stanwyck playing Fred MacMurray like a violin in
"Double Indemnity." One kiss with Ava Lord and, forget it, you're
willing to do anything. There is one scene where Ava, totally nude,
dives into her pool, and Rodriguez shows it to us doubled, two white
nude bodies diving towards each other through the black, the water
splashing out at us whitely in 3-D. It's a kaleidoscope moment, a Busby
Berkeley nod, a perfect evocation of the dizzying effect this sociopath
has on the men unfortunate enough to cross her path. Dwight (Josh
Brolin, taking up the role played by Clive Owen in the first film) has a
past with Ava, knows she is bad news, and yet there she stands at the
doorway, in her bright blue silk coat, ravishing against the
black-and-white scenery, and what is a man supposed to do? Eva Green
plays Ava with a great and controlled relish, bringing on the crocodile
tears or her sexuality or her helplessness when she needs them, her
green eyes gleaming cunningly out of her black-and-white face.
Both Rodriguez and Miller have come under fire for their tendency to classify women as angels or whores, and to display their bodies in ways that often make you feel as though you've strolled into an exploitation film from about 1974. But "Sin City" is clearly an homage to noir-inflected thrillers and comic books in which women are cunning creatures, willing to trade their sexuality for money to gain advantage or protection. The men are often more physically or economically powerful than the women, but they also tend to be naive and dumb in ways they can't see because their vision is fogged by lust. Rodriguez/Miller's presentation of women may be one-note, but it's not nearly as reductive as the one offered in teenage sex comedies like the recent "Behaving Badly," or in the films of Judd Apatow, where women's only power comes from being passive-aggressive and petulant. At least in "Sin City" women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination. In "Sin City" it seems like full immersion into the values of cartoon pulp.
"Sin
City: A Dame to Kill For" doesn't have the electricity of the original,
mainly because we've seen it all once before. Nothing new is really revealed
here, either through story or style. But Rodriguez and Miller are completely committed to their vision, such as it is, and its ferocity can't be easily dismissed.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A review of Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" from its NYFF premiere last night.
A review of season two of FX's "Fargo."