Director's Chair: 36
Charles Harris is the director of Footloose Films, whose credits include the international award winning Paradise Grove.This June, he gives us his take on 36 and Barton Fink - so read ahead for our Indie director's Indie choice!
If Pernod made movies, they'd be like 36. In fact for all I know Pernod did make 36. This is a movie that makes cops look even sexier than they do in New York, a movie that kicks you in the culottes and gives you a Gallic shrug when you lie bleeding in the gutter.
It's got two of the heavyweights of French cinema - Auteil and Depardieu - as a pair of cops who were once friends and now head rival police departments and hate each other's guts. It's got a gang of vicious armed robbers loose in Paris. And it's got the bright idea of promoting whichever of the two gets the gang first to become the new Chief of Police.
Director and co-writer Olivier Marchal set out to make a French Heat (it's better than Heat) and based it on his own life in the French police. If this is representative, you'll wonder he's still alive, let alone sane. Of course, he may not be (sane, that is). But he makes a great movie. You've got intrigue, you've got vitriol, but most of all you've got style (say it with a French accent).
Invite someone to dinner who says they hate movies with subtitles, handcuff them to the settee, prop their eyes open with anything that comes to hand, and watch them be seduced and beg for more. Or better still sit down with a Pernod and a black leather jacket with your collar turned up. If you don't like it, I don't look like Gérard Derpardieu. (Well, I don't but I feel I do when I watch films like this).
If 36 was a movie made by Pernod, then Barton Fink is a movie made by the coffee you get in some second rate hotel off-off-Sunset Boulevard with wallpaper that peels in the heat and strange people carrying strange parcels sit staring into space in the room next to you.
This is a movie with style, but said in a laid-back, West Coast Jewish accent, with a mouthful of cheap hamburger and fries. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is plucked reluctantly from his artistic purity on Broadway to prostitute his art in Hollywood, seduced by the studio's professed love of the "Barton Fink feeling". If only he knew what the Barton Fink feeling was. Soon there is more life and death at stake than just scriptwriting.
If you haven't already seen it, then you either receive your TV programming direct from the planet Zorg, or have had your eyeballs plucked out by marauding zombies, but it's a movie that grows on you more and more at second and third viewing.
Who can beat the Coen Brothers at their best, amid the insipid watered-down tea that goes for Hollywood cinema nowadays? Along with the Coen Brothers' mind games, the twisted characters and the deadpan funny dialogue (especially poignant if you've ever dealt with anyone in the film industry) don't you miss the sheer physical exuberance of their filming? In this film, things ooze, slide, slosh, gurgle and thwack like they should in the movies. From mosquitoes to typewriter keys to blood to that accursed peeling wallpaper, your ears and eyeballs are due for a treat.
Sounds like they could be back to form with their new one, at Cannes last month. While we wait, this'll keep you going back to that sleazy, hot, sticky hotel.
Charles Harris
Watch 36 on Saturday, June 9th and Tuesday, June 26th on Sky Movies Indie.
Watch Barton Fink on Wednesday, June13th, Saturday, June 23rd and Tuesday, June 26th, on Sky Movies Indie.
