It’s often said that strong roles for women are rare nowadays, but three new movies—Under the Sand, Ghost World, and The Deep End—have the virtue of handing a juicy, sympathetic part to a talented actress and letting her run with it. All three are directed by men, which raises the question of whether women will find these portraits as potent and sensitive as I do. Yet even if they qualify to some degree as male fantasies, I’d argue that they’re more in touch with our everyday reality and our history than a male fantasy like Apocalypse Now Redux.
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As the henchman who falls in love with his victim, Goran Visnjic can’t hold a candle to James Mason in The Reckless Moment, but Swinton manages to make us forget her own glamorous predecessor, Joan Bennett, by conceiving the part so differently that comparisons aren’t meaningful. (That Swinton was born in Scotland and plays most often in English films surely helps.) In any case, it’s she who singlehandedly veers the film away from the academicism and postmodernism (both stemming from the noir aspects) of McGehee and Siegel’s previous feature, Suture, by giving her hausfrau heroine an almost obsessional sense of middle-class routine and propriety. Practically everyone else in the story shows traces of the noirish material, sliding into all-too-familiar types, but Swinton makes the misogynist undertones of noir irrelevant to her character. Far from being any sort of bitch goddess, she’s a powerhouse of controlled energy; essentially, she belongs in another movie, and it’s mainly this other movie that makes The Deep End worth seeing. For everything else, you’re better off tracking down the original—not an easy matter, alas, because, like so many other gems in Hollywood auteurist cinema, it isn’t on video.
Ozon, the only director here who started from an original story, asked three women to help him with his script. His story concerns Marie (Rampling), an English-born woman who teaches English literature in Paris. She and her French husband Jean (Bruno Cremer) go on vacation to their country house near the sea, and one day he goes off to take a swim and never comes back. The remainder of the film is devoted not to solving this mystery in any definitive way—though we may wind up concluding, along with Marie, that the disappearance was most likely suicide—but to chronicling Marie’s slow, incremental adjustment to her loss. She still imagines her husband is with her much of the time—something the film shows us from her viewpoint—and continues to speak of him in the present tense, even though her friends use the past. She picks up a lover named Vincent (Jacques Nolot) and enjoys his company—she’s particularly struck by the fact that he, unlike Jean, isn’t overweight, so sex is a lot less cumbersome—but this relationship appears to be abruptly cut off the moment he tries to get her to accept her loss.
Like its central character, the plot of Ghost World basically drifts rather than proceeds in any clear or purposeful direction, and despite some awkward allegorical and psychological touches near the end (relatively disconnected bits about a phantom bus stop and Seymour’s relation to his shrink and mother), the absence of conventional closure is part of what’s so brave about the movie—as brave in a way as Enid herself. Disdainful of almost everything she sees around her—even more so than her best friend and classmate, the slightly better adjusted Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson)—she discovers that she has to take an art course in summer school if she’s to graduate from high school.
Directed by Francois Ozon
Written by Ozon, Emmanuele Bernheim, Marina de Van, and Marcia Romano
With Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Cremer, Jacques Nolot, and Alexandra Stewart.
Ghost World ★★★
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Written by Daniel Clowes and Zwigoff
With Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, and Stacey Travis.
The Deep End ★★ (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
With Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker, Peter Donat, Josh Lucas, and Raymond Barry.
