THE MAINE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
2005 DIARY

By Laurie Meunier Graves

DAY 6

Well, the day of reckoning finally comes. In all fairness, I must note that I had been warned by members of the staff, but I was hoping against hope that the awful event wouldn’t come to pass, that someone at Railroad Square would do something. But somehow they haven’t, and now I must deal with a terrible loss. Dear reader, Railroad Square has run out of Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pops. Even worse, as far as the staff knows, there are no plans to replenish the supply. To me, this is almost beyond comprehension. Would they be so cavalier if they ran out of popcorn? Butter? Coffee? Soft drinks? No, no, no, and no. They would rush out as fast as they could and get more. But for some unknown reason, Peace Pops fall into a different category. When they’re gone, they’re gone, and that seems to be that.

I only eat Peace Pops at the film festival, and this is a cruel blow. Still, I bear my disappointment bravely. I even find orange truffle chocolate bars at the snack counter, and they almost make up for the Peace Pop loss. Almost. In truth, they are absolutely delicious—rich dark chocolate with the tang of orange—but as I eat one, I have a thought that nearly freezes me in horror. What if they run out of truffle bars?

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
France, 2005; 107 minutes; 35mm; in French with English subtitles



I think it’s safe to say that Romain Duris, the star not only of The Beat That My Heart Skipped but also of Exiles, is one of France’s up and coming young actors. Dark and good-looking, Duris can be funny as wall as intense, and he has the ability to draw audiences into his character’s world, a gift that not all actors possess. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Duris plays Tom, a twenty-eight-year-old real estate thug who lets rats loose in buildings and smashes windows and appliances to get the deals he wants. He has a Falstaffian wreck of a father who is about as capable as Shakespeare’s most famous miscreant. He relies on Tom to rescue him from shady deals gone bad and is an expert at using guilt to manipulate his son. Not surprisingly, Tom is a bundle of twitchy energy and has “anger management issues.” Yet, Tom loves his father and is fiercely loyal to the old man, who gets far more from his son than he deserves.

Fortunately, Tom did not lose out completely with his genetic inheritance. (If he had, the movie would have been unwatchable.) His mother was a concert pianist, and, after Tom has a chance encounter with her former manager, we learn that Tom has some talent playing the piano. The manager encourages Tom to come audition for him, but Tom has a slight problem—he hasn’t really played for ten years or so. To make up for this, Tom takes a crash music course with a beautiful young Chinese woman named Miao Lin, who has recently moved to France. He doesn’t speak Chinese; she doesn’t speak French. She is calm, exacting, and serene. Tom is tense, raw, and he howls in rage when he doesn’t get it right. Yet these opposites connect, and Miao Lin teaches Tom to combine precision with passion, which he has in such abundance.

Naturally, his mother’s world of music clashes with his father’s world of shady deals, and Tom must decide in which world he wants to live. Fate forces Tom to deal with a horrific event that paradoxically sets him free. By the end, Duris has made Tom so vivid and real that we desperately want him to succeed, and we hardly dare move as we watch this brash, young man deal with the parts of his divided self. It’s an acting tour de force worthy of an Academy Award.


ASYLUM
United Kingdom; 2005; 97 minutes; 35mm; in English



What happens when you have a team of thoroughbreds and make them run on a second-rate racetrack? You get a movie like Asylum, a humdrum thriller that manages to hold your attention for ninety-seven minutes, but just barely. Coming after The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Asylum illustrates how dreary a movie can be when the characters don’t draw you in, and, worse yet, when their motivations are so opaque that it makes them seem even more remote. There are two deaths in the film, and I was moved by neither of them. Not a good sign, especially when both of the people who died were major characters. And what a shame, because Asylum has some terrific actors, including Ian Mckellan, Natasha Richardson, and Hugh Bonneville.

Asylum is set in the 1950s, and it has the staple we have come to expect from that era, the bright but bored housewife. It has the added twist of placing her in an asylum for the criminally insane, not as a patient but rather as the wife of one of the staff doctors. (I must concede that this is not a plot combination we see very often, and there just might be a reason for this.) Before you can say, “housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Stella, the housewife, has begun a steamy affair with Edgar, a patient who has been committed for murdering his wife when he was in a jealous rage. Stella knows this before she allows Edgar to rip off her panties when they are together in the greenhouse, but like all foolish movie characters, she doesn’t let a little thing like murder get in the way of her passion. As a woman, I can almost understand why. Edgar is damned good looking and has, as they say, that certain something.

Guess what happens next. Stella comes to her senses and decides to become a student of theoretical physics. Just kidding, of course. Events unfold exactly as you would expect, with Stella and Edgar becoming ever more obsessed with each other. Ian McKellen makes an appearance as a manipulative doctor, but unfortunately his role really is just an appearance, thrown in here and there but with not enough depth to make the character either compelling or comprehensible. Does he have a thing for Stella? Or maybe for Edgar? Does he just like messing with their minds? We never know. The movie doesn’t give us enough to go on, and because everything hinges on McKellan’s character, this is a fatal flaw indeed.

Day 7 -->

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