No Such Thing
The Sleepy Time Gal
Considering these two films together is a breach of reviewing etiquette: movies that premiere in theaters are supposed to be in a different category than movies that premiere on TV. I first saw the Munch film, about a woman dying of cancer, last fall on video at the Vancouver international film festival, and I remember looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. Now I can only wonder if I’ll ever be able to–and if I can’t I’ll never be able to decide how good it really is, because Munch’s films all have a sense of spectacle that depends in part on the size and definition of the screen image, as well as on the way the images are edited together. (“Edited on film,” the final credits note proudly, reinforcing the idea that a video of a film edit, or an edit seen on a TV screen, may be only an approximation.) A recent second viewing on video reminded me of some of the film’s virtues and flaws without clarifying what its strengths as a big-screen movie might be.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I saw No Such Thing for the first time last week, when it was screened in 35-millimeter. It premiered at Cannes last May, and the only buzz I heard about it was unfavorable; for the most part it was ignored. Its allegorical and satirical story concerns a savage and murderous monster (Robert John Burke) in the wilds of Iceland who’s older than humanity, which he despises, and who wants only to be destroyed–something only a missing mad scientist named Dr. Artaud (Baltasar Kormakur) knows how to accomplish. The monster is tracked down by Beatrice (Sarah Polley), a young New Yorker working for a sensationalist TV news program produced by another kind of monster known as the Boss (well played by Helen Mirren), who thrives on violence and catastrophes. Beatrice is following in the footsteps of her journalist boyfriend, who disappeared with his crew, but she manages to achieve an uneasy truce and friendship with the monster and brings him back to New York, where it turns out Artaud is being held in captivity by the Boss. Eventually the monster, his designated assassin, and Beatrice return to Iceland to negotiate their collective destiny.
I think there’s a different reason. After all, No Such Thing is an American-Icelandic production–though Francis Ford Coppola is one of three executive producers–with some Icelandic locations and actors as well as two English actresses, Mirren and Julie Christie (in a cameo as a nurse). By contrast, The Sleepy Time Gal has American characters and is set in American locations–New York, San Francisco, Daytona Beach, Boston, and rural Pennsylvania–though there’s one brief glimpse of a London phone booth. (Bisset, who plays an American, is English, but achieved a letter-perfect American accent after months of careful work.) I also don’t think that the film’s sensibility is European. Munch’s first film, The Hours and Times (1991), dealt with two English lads (John Lennon and Brian Epstein) on a weekend holiday in Barcelona, but he’s still as American as apple pie–or Faulkner–when it comes to speculating about who his characters are and how they operate.
Munch’s second feature, Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996), made less of a lasting impression on me than his first or The Sleepy Time Gal, but all of his singular work is the result of his neat and decorous way of suggesting messy and unruly lives. In spite of the multifaceted nuances and suggestions of Bisset’s performance as Frances, along with those of the characters closest to her–such as her gay photographer son (Nick Stahl as Munch’s surrogate) and a former lover (Seymour Cassel)–it’s the incidental characters who reveal Munch’s talent at its most wonderful: a black radio station manager (Frankie R. Faison), Cassel’s wife (Peggy Gormley), a French girl gathering mushrooms near San Francisco Bay with whom Frances converses, Frances’s racist mother, Frances’s nurse (Amy Madigan). Finally there’s Rebecca (Martha Plimpton)–the daughter Frances had with Cassel, put up for adoption, lost track of, and perpetually yearns for–a corporate lawyer who yearns equally for the mother she never knew.
