When I watched the opening scene of Elevator to the Gallows and Jeanne Moreau’s face filled the screen, I kept thinking to myself how stunning this must have been for audiences to see on the big screen. Most of the audience in 1958 would not have been familiar with her, but I can’t imagine any of them leaving the theater without making a mental note to see her future films. Men would want to see her to possess her once again, at least in their imaginations.  Women would want to see her again to deconstruct her, to look for the tricks in the width of an eyebrow or a shade of lipstick or the way her hair was styled.


There is such a heady mixture of strength and vulnerability in how Florence Carala (Moreau) looks at the camera. Even when her face is absolutely still, her eyes convey the churning that is going on inside of her. She is in love with Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), and they have come up with a clever plan to kill her husband and, therefore, clear the way to be together. Like all plans, clever or otherwise, things go wrong. Something takes too long or in the case of Tavernier a ringing phone distracts him just enough that he leaves a rope dangling where no rope should be.


Miles Davis provided the musical cues for the movie. These became the basis for his album Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, which was the precursor to his masterpieces Milestones and Kind of Blue. Working on the movie was a breakthrough creatively for Davis. He was in the midst of a love affair with Jeanne Moreau during the film, and I do wonder if she was the muse at the right time who encouraged him to new levels of innovation and originality.

Davis wraps his music around Florence Carala as she stumbles through the Champs Elysée at night with her face only lit intermittently by the brash lighting coming from the shop windows. Davis’s heart breaking horn is the only accompaniment she will have all night as she tries not to believe that she has been jilted by her lover. If she did know the truth, that he is trapped in an elevator all night, she would merely be exchanging one set of anxieties for another. All of her angst, insecurity, and fears play across her features as discernible as if she were confessing them to us.


I wasn’t surprised to discover that the director Louis Malle was also infatuated with Moreau. Throughout the whole movie, he is making love to her with the camera. In fact, they had a torrid affair during the next film that they made together called The Lovers . Elevator to the Gallows was the beginning of stardom for Moreau, but The Lovers, with the censorship issues which boosted box office attendance, was the movie that confirmed her as a star. The stress and strain revolving around the movie also lead to the demise of her affair with Malle.

Moreau once said,  “I never felt at ease on the screen because I was aware that I was far from beautiful.” She certainly isn’t a traditional beauty, but Malle convinced me as he did many others that she is beautiful, certainly a woman who commands the eyes of those she passes on the street.


Tavernier is already outside in his car when he notices the rope still dangling from the side of the building. He rushes inside leaving his car running, unattended, which compounds the original mistake, and will lead to many more twists and turns to the plot as a young hoodlum with a head full of half baked philosophical ideas and his girlfriend steal the car.


This movie was the beginning of a new kind of French film. It was a mixture of realism and Old Hollywood noir that combined together beautifully to make for a very elegant, compelling cinematic experience. This movie also launched the career of an actress who would go on to be regarded as one of the finest French actresses in the history of cinema.  Highly recommended!!

Griffin Mill: I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.


Griffin Mill, Tim Robbins, is a studio executive who listens to 50,000 pitches for movies a year, and maybe green lights 12 of them. He is known as a writer’s executive mainly because, even though he turns most of them down, he doesn’t piss them off in the process.


Well, except one.


He’s getting postcards. They have Golden Age actors on the photo side and threatening words on the other side. There are no clues to who the person is or even what they want. If I were to get one or two threatening postcards, it would worry me, but once I got the third one, I’d be starting to think this was something I needed to take seriously. Griffin feels the same way. Normally, he would take this problem to the studio head of security Walter Stuckel, Fred Ward, but the fact that the studio is shopping around for other executives, in particular a new hotshot named Larry Levy, Peter Gallagher, leaves Griffin feeling too vulnerable to bring any potential negative attention on himself.


He’s seen a lot of detective films, right? So why not do a little snooping on his own to see if he can figure out who exactly he pissed off. He determines it would take a few months for a writer to get really angry over not being called back or being rejected. He pulls the files and looks through the potential candidates and decides that David Kahane, Vincent D’Onofrio, fits the profile. Of course, who can forget D’Onofrio just a few years later starring as The Bug in Men in Black? He was fabulous.


Griffin goes out to Pasadena to David’s house. He ends up talking to David’s girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir, Greta Scacchi, on the phone as he watches her through the window work on her artwork. I’ve always thought that Greta has such a nice face; even as she has aged, she has always looked so kind and approachable. June sends Griffin to a movie house playing The Bicycle Thief.  After several miscues with the wrong guys, Griffin finally finds David. They go to a Japanese restaurant to have a few drinks. Griffin tells David that he will get his movie deal just quit sending the postcards.


Griffin Mill: Just... stop with the postcards...

David Kahane: [enraged] I don't WRITE POSTCARDS! I WRITE SCRIPTS!

The argument carries into the parking lot. David, very intoxicated, pushes Griffin down. When he helps him up, Griffin slings him down and pushes his head under the water at the bottom of a stairwell. Not Griffin’s finest hour. He has the presence of mind to make it look like a robbery. His movie watching background comes in handy once again.

Griffin soon discovers that he killed the wrong man via a fax from his tormenter, just as Walter Stuckel is informing him that the Pasadena police want to talk to him. The lead detective played by Whoopi Goldberg is hilarious. Lyle Lovett plays the detective who starts following Griffin around. Lovett is not a handsome man, and in a world that emphasises attractive features, he sticks out like a sore thumb. His appearance and his odd behavior increase Griffin’s agitation.


At David’s funeral, Griffin meets June again and takes her home. She is such an odd person, so different from the greedy, self-serving people he is used to interacting with in Hollywood.


June: I don't go to movies.

Griffin Mill: Why not?

June: Life is too short.


Of course, a relationship with the deceased's girlfriend gives him a motive, and the pressure increases on Griffin as the police try to tie him to the murder. The cat and mouse game with the postcard writer escalates. Griffin is telling too many lies to everyone from June, to the police, to his boss, to himself. It is as if the postcard writer is the only one who really knows the truth.


There are over sixty celebrity cameos in the movie from Angelica Huston, John Cusack, Jeff Goldblum to Burt Reynolds. This film was released in 1992, and it is certainly one of my favorite movies from the 1990s and even of all time. The satirical, clever script with nimble, amusing dialogue is a pleasure to experience every time I watch this film. The facial expressions of Tim Robbins add further elements to the movie. You can actually see the wheels and gears of his mind working as he puzzles over what he needs to do next to keep one step ahead of the gnarled, jumbled mess of his own deceptions. “Griffin, you move in mysterious ways, but I like it! I like it!”


The ending is perfect. This film is one of those go to movies whenever I need to relax, laugh, and root for a man who despite his many failings I can’t help liking.

"Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to."


David Cronenberg is certainly one of the better choices of directors to navigate the twisted and demented mind of William S. Burroughs. I have a vision of Cronenberg in a small boat floating in water as black as oil. The boat is springing leaks from all the strange creatures that are gnawing at the boards on the underside. Exotic fauna, forming splashes of unnatural colors, grow along the banks. Leaf shaped words, unspeakable words, drip a sticky white jelly on Cronenberg’s hair as he passes under them. Animals whine from the darkness. Burned out synapses hang overhead looking like trees that have been hit by lightning. Fear and elation mix in his stomach, like two cats in a bag, each slashing and scrambling to be the one to live. He would have to think as he goes deeper and deeper into this terrifying exploration of the mostly unknowable that Spike Jonze had a cake walk navigating John Malkovich’s mind.


So my first thought is how do you film Naked Lunch? Anyone who has read the book would have to feel it is an impossible task. The perversions, the hallucinations, the spurting sperm, the disjointed impressions, the grotesqueness, and the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals all create a kaleidoscope of confusion.


Now the movie is not anywhere near as weird and convoluted as the book. The movie,though, is plenty weird on its own. Cronenberg took elements from Naked Lunch,, other Burroughs writings, and pieces from Burroughs' life to create a movie that is actually an homage to the mind of William S. Burroughs.


The movie begins with William Lee (alter ego of Burroughs played by Peter Weller) working as an exterminator. He is mystified when he runs out of bug powder half way through a job. Someone has been stealing his bug powder! When he returns home, he catches his wife Joan (Judy Davis) shooting up with bug powder, mystery solved. He decides to try it, and soon both are addicted.


That’s when the bugs and other strange creatures start showing up.


The police run him in for suspected drug dealing and confiscate his canister for spraying bug powder. He loses his livelihood and his access to the very addictive bug powder. He goes to see a Dr. Benway who scores him an even stronger drug called Black Meat which is made from the guts of giant centipedes. He is so excited about trying this new drug that he walks right past his friend Hank (stand in for Jack Kerouac in the book as well.) who is listlessly screwing Joan. WIlliam is much more intent on getting the Black Meat into his bloodstream.

Hallucinations become stronger. His typewriter turns into a insect that starts issuing him instructions, including commanding him to kill his wife who is an enemy agent. The famous William Tell scene where Burroughs actually killed his own wife accidentally (in real life) by trying to shoot a glass off her head is incorporated into the movie with similar results. After killing his wife, William Lee flees to a planet called Interzone where he meets his wife’s doppleganger Joan Frost.


”No American should find himself in a foreign land without a pistol.”


He continues to believe he is a secret agent and keeps typing up reports on his insectoid typewriter which will all be collected eventually into the book Naked Lunch.


Peter Weller is dead pan, calm, cool, and collected, much as I feel Burroughs was even as his life continued to fall apart and become stranger and stranger. Most of it completely his fault. The sex in the movie is farcical, completely different from the graphic, sometimes perverted sex in the book. The colors are bright, almost festive in the movie as if color has been heightened by the hallucinatory drugs William Lee has floating in his bloodstream. The creatures from the alien handler to the insect typewriters are more hilarious than terrifying. I found the whole movie brilliant. I have not seen all of Cronenberg’s film, but by far this is my favorite. It is a well constructed, enjoyable homage to Burroughs.


With the Criterion Blu Ray copy, they included a pamphlet with essays about Cronenberg, the making of the film, and a short piece written by Burroughs endorsing the film. It took more than ten years for Cronenberg to track down the financing and get this movie made. For this fan of Burroughs and Cronenberg, I was so glad he was so tenacious.

William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg on the set of Naked Lunch

”After being bombarded endlessly by road safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to have found myself in an actual accident.”


I’d always planned to read the book <i>Crash</i> (1973) by J. G. Ballard and then watch the movie directed by David Cronenberg. Finally this year, driven by a heightened sense of desire to see more Cronenberg movies, I read the book, an original, mind altered story that inspired the equally unique movie Crash (1996).


For a movie like this you of course have to get James Spader.


It all begins really with a car crash. James Ballard (James Spader) is in a head on car crash that results in the death of the man in the other car. Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), the wife of the dead man is also hurt badly. There is a connection made between Ballard and the wife as her husband bleeds out.


While in the hospital Ballard meets Vaughn (Elias Koteas) who is fascinated with the braces holding Ballard’s shattered leg together. He takes pictures of Ballard’s leg. As we get to know Vaughn better we find out he takes pictures of car crashes, driving around the city in his Lincoln convertible which becomes more and more battered each time we see it, and listening to the scanner for car crashes that he can race to go see. He explains that he is interested in the <b>"reshaping of the human body by modern technology",</b> but it is much more than that. He is a fetishist, a sexual deviant who becomes aroused over not just car crashes, but the wounds inflicted on the victims. He also has what can only be thought of as a death wish as he recreates, with the help of fellow car crash fans, celebrity car crashes.


Ballard and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) are in an open marriage. Their sexual relationship is apathetic at best until they start sharing with each other their conquests outside of their marriage. They both become caught up in Vaughn’s obsession with car crashes. At one point Ballard drives Vaughn’s Lincoln convertible around while Vaughn picks up hookers to have sex with in the back seat. This takes a more personal turn when Vaughn has sex with Catherine while Ballard drives them around. Vaughn is rough with Catherine leaving her bruised and battered. She has fear in her eyes possibly for the first time thinking that they have went further than she is comfortable with.


Ballard has sex with the beautiful Gabrielle (Rosanne Arquette) who wears heavy braces on both her legs. Despite the heavy scarring on her body or maybe because of it she is more attractive than she was before her accident. Her scars, to these men and women, enhance her sexual allure.  


The sex scenes in the movie are graphic and at times disturbing. Most of the sex takes place in cars as the characters are more aroused in a car. It is quite the merry-go-round of sexual partners. As Ballard becomes more obsessed with the car crash perversions, he also becomes more obsessed with Vaughn. Soon he is fantasizing about having sex with him. Vaughn is game, especially with all those car crash scars on Ballard’s leg for him to caress.


I would recommend reading the book and then watching the movie. Both are excellent, disturbing, horrifying; and yet, somehow by the end, what seems perverse and dangerous becomes more acceptable. To think of these obsessions as reasonable adds to the dread and left this movie watcher shaken.

I don’t care who you are, what you do, or where you live there is going to be a scene in this movie that is going to make you uncomfortable. It might be the gut wrenching moments of a love lost never to be regained, or it might be the explicit sex so graphically presented or the honesty of the dialog or the raw pain of facing the consequences of lying to someone you love.


This film took the 2014 Cannes Film Festival by storm.


I can see why.


Adèle ( Adèle Exarchopoulous) is in high school preparing to be a teacher. She has lots of friends. She is beautiful, loves reading, and is one of those freaks of nature (like me) that loves her literature class the best of all. The discussions in her classes are fantastic, deeper and much more meaningful than most of the classes I had in college.


I was actually a little jealous.


There is a boy who likes her. She may not have ever noticed his interest if her friends hadn’t pointed out to her the way he is always casting glances her direction. We sometimes go out with people we’ve never really thought about being with simply because they find us attractive. It must be some need for reassurance, a need to discover why they like us. Unfortunately for the young man, Adèle is going to leave his feelings in a shambles, his self-confidence in tatters, and have him questioning for the rest of his life as to what he did wrong.


It wasn’t his fault.


It wasn’t even Adèle’s fault.


She’s been dreaming you see. Intense, erotic dreams of a young woman she saw in the street with blue hair and a fetching small gap between her teeth.  Adèle goes searching for her blue haired siren ( Léa Seydoux) and finds her in a lesbian bar. It turns out her name is Emma, and she is an artist.


It becomes a torrid affair of passion and fire that leaves both women happily scorched by their own desires and overwhelmed with a growing obsession for each other. Adèle glides into the role as hostess for Emma’s parties. She cooks, prepares, and makes them smashing successes. Adèle’s nude portraits are the talk and envy of all the artists who all wish they had a person in their life inspiring that kind of fervor on canvas. As Adèle meets Emma’s intellectual friends, she is asked what she plans to do. When she says she is going to teach, everyone responds with a slight grimace. It makes me wonder if there is a growing anti-education feeling in Europe like there has always been in America. Both geographies may feel they don’t need public education, but for very different reasons.


Most of the conversations are over Adèle’s head, making her feel uncomfortable and out of place. I thought they were terrific and reminded me of the fascinating conversations in The Great Beauty, another movie I liked a lot. Emma, almost apologetic, tells her friends that Adèle is a writer, as if teaching is not enough, that anyone worthwhile must have some artistic endeavor they are pursuing.


As Emma becomes more and more busy. Adèle becomes more and more lonely. The intensity of their passion settles into a more work-a-day relationship. Jealousy blows through Adèle’s mind like a cannonball leaving her shaken and scared. She makes bad decisions seemingly unaware of the risks she is taking. Sometimes we are just too young to understand what we have until we’ve already mucked it up.


I realized at this point in the movie that I had become fond of Adèle despite her missteps or maybe exactly because of them.


The movie is famous for the graphic sex scenes, and yes there are plenty of them. In fact you might even say the camera lingered on those scenes longer than necessary, Some will watch the movie for those scenes, but I hope that they become more moved by the performance of Adèle Exarchopoulous. She shows us the emotional toil of a lost love and shows the anguish of knowing the lion’s share of the fault for her loss lies on her own shoulders. Life doesn’t always give us a second chance.


Adèle became the youngest artist to ever receive the prestigious Palme d'Or. It was such a demanding role physically and mentally for someone so young. I hope she has a long, successful career ahead of her because I want to be inspired by her again and again.

David Cronenberg wrote this movie on the fly. He was knocking out chunks of script as the movie was being filmed, and when they weren’t filming, he was driving around looking for locations to film the next scenes. The miracle of film, much like the theater, is that this movie was ever completed given the circumstances, and also that it manages to be a movie that bears discussion.


The famous scene from this movie, the exploding head, was supposed to be the opening frames of the movie, but test audiences were so stunned by the scene that they never really recovered to watch the rest of the movie. Even moved back further in the movie, it still is, even today, visually impacting. When a low level scanner, someone with telepathic ability, is asking the audience for volunteers to be probed by his mind, I know something sinister is about to happen when Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) volunteers. We learn very quickly that Revok is a rogue scanner working against the private security firm ConSec who is trying to develop a scanner program for military applications. Revok has successfully turned most of the known scanners to his cause, and the ones that don’t accept his cause are eliminated.


The join us or die concept.


Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) is the languidly cool, intelligent guru of the scanners program. He recruits Cameron Vale (Steven Lack), an under the radar scanner who is just discovering his skills, to take on Revok and his group of “rogue” scanners. The acting by Lack is distractedly wooden. This may have been intentional to give the audience the feeling that he is something less/more than human. Vale infiltrates the scanner organization and discovers that ConSec and the rogue scanners are tied together through a program called RIPE that will distribute a drug that will turn babies in the womb into scanners. He also convinces Kim Obrist (Jennifer O’Neill), a scanner, to help him.


There are gunfights, car crashes, and telepathic inspired explosions. When people in the movie are hit with gunfire, the blood spews as if a ketchup bottle exploded out of their clothes. It was certainly over the top and elicited more than one laugh from me. The plot all comes to a final <i>The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly</i> scene with Vale taking on Revok man to man in a telepathic battle which both “the good” guy and “the bad” guy end up looking very UGLY. Michael Ironsides, or the poor director’s Jack Nicholson, was actually the right combination of menacing craziness.


This movie was shot cheaply, quickly, and could have certainly been a lot better movie if David Cronenberg had more time and money, but despite those factors the movie was interesting and certainly watchable. It actually did well at the box office making a nice profit for the investors. There are just enough gruesome scenes to remind you this is a Cronenberg movie. Not one of Cronenberg’s best, but certainly a movie worth seeing if you are a Cronenberg fan. If  for nothing else, you’ve got to see this guy’s ⇩ head explode.

Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has just been released from a short stay in a mental institution. She has...well...issues. Life is stressful for all of us, and some of us are better at releasing the pressure than others, but the only way Lee can release that tension is through pain.


She cuts herself or presses hot water kettles against her thigh.


Crazy? Maybe not so crazy, certainly not any more crazy than the rest of her family. As we learn more about her family, we discover that some of the more “acceptable” ways of dealing with stress, like her father’s (Stephen McHattie) alcohol problems, are actually more damaging to the body than Lee’s method. Her mother (Lesley Ann Warren) is extremely unhappy and hides it under a blanket of fake cheeriness. Lee’s boyfriend Peter (Jeremy Davies) is coming off of his own mental breakdown and is kind and considerate to Lee, but what she craves is really just a good spanking.


When Lee finds a job as a secretary working for Mr. E. Edward Grey (James Spader), it is readily apparent that he runs an unusual office. Everything is just a little off about Grey, from injecting his office plants with syringes filled with some unknown concoction to the OCD line of red magic markers that are carefully aligned on his desk. After some jousting back and forth and with some mutual revelations about each other’s somewhat unnatural predilections, they start to discover that both of them need what the other dishes out.


The sadomasochistic elements of their relationship bloom into so much more than just fulfilling desire. This, as it turns out, is a love story.


This is not a movie about discovering you are weird and that you must become less weird. This is a movie about embracing how you are different and finding someone who understands.


E. Edward Grey: Why do you cut yourself, Lee?

Lee: I don't know.

E. Edward Grey: Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface, and when you see evidence of the pain inside you finally know you're really here? Then, when you watch the wound heal, it's comforting... isn't it?

Lee: I... That's a way to put it.


The characters are simply fascinating, brilliant casting and brilliant acting bring them fully to life. The quirky, humorous dialogue is at times laugh out loud funny. The circumstances creating these bizarre interactions between characters are so deftly done that I accepted all of it without blinking an eye. I could feel my perceptions of sadomasochism evolving as I started to get to know Lee and Edward. By the end of the movie what once seemed weird didn’t seem odd at all.


E. Edward Grey: Look, we can't do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Lee: Why not?

Our narrator, the actor Edward Norton, is working one of those soulless corporate jobs that makes you feel like punching yourself in the face every morning and drinking too much vodka every evening. He has this immaculate apartment full of IKEA furniture, no girlfriend, no friends to speak of, and nothing but endless hours to fill. It is no wonder that he is depressed and not sleeping. His therapist suggests that he go to support groups to help him understand that his life is actually pretty good compared to a lot of other people. He starts noticing that this same woman, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), is showing up to all the same support groups. It should be a commonality that will blossom into a beautiful friendship...well...not exactly. He does discover that going to support groups is strangely uplifting. Score one for therapy! He may even be on the road to discovering how to enjoy life.


Until his apartment blows up.


The only person he can think to call is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman he met on a plane. Tyler is someone who is determined to squeeze the most out of life. He is dynamic, a natural leader, an anarchist, and a man with a head full of philosophies. He is the exact opposite of Edward Norton.  He lets Norton move into his ramshackle condemned mansion with peeling wall paper, unstable water supply, moldy ceilings, and just enough tarnished glamour left to give us a glimmer of the elegance that once shimmered from the expensive fixtures.


Outside of a bar they get into a scuffle that turns into a fight. They pummel each other pretty well, certainly well enough to loosen teeth, bruise a few features, and leave both mopping away blood. Not only does this make them best friends, I know this is one of those baffling things about men that women don’t understand, but they also discover that they...well...loved it.


Fight Club is born!


It turns out there are a lot of men out there that find their life to be tedious. Their dormant, testosterone driven need to hit and be hit is roused and able to express itself in the fighting ring at Fight Club. They are tested, sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, but they walk away feeling more like...men. Many of our jobs are becoming so passive. Men used to be warriors; men used to build things; men used to conquer the wilderness; men used to have a swagger based on ability rather than an overinflated ego. Sitting in a cubicle all day with a tie wrapped around their throat instead of a bandoleer just doesn’t cut it. Oxford dress shoes instead of a good pair of boots make them feel meek and mild. Clothing that would be ripped to shreds under any duress does not make them feel powerful. Is this how a man is suppose to be?


Well yes, it is called civilization.


Not that I don’t hear the call of the wild from time to time. Not that I don’t feel my blood stir with the thought of using my brawn rather than my brains. It is the slumbering lizard in all of us just waiting to be woke up and called to action, claws extended.


Marla calls the Narrator to let him know that she had decided to kill herself. He wasn’t interested, but Tyler picks up the phone and saves her from herself. The result, much to the Narrator’s irritation, is that Tyler and Marla begin a relationship...well...an animalistic, banging on the walls, shattering the bed frame series of sexual events.


Let’s just say things begin to get wiggy.


The reason it took me so long to watch this movie was because of the title. I find boxing frankly boring to watch, and couldn’t imagine that I would enjoy watching a movie based around men beating the crap out of each other. The movie is, of course, so much more. Yes, it is gratuitous, and certainly if they had cut out a few more scenes of fighting, it would not have hurt my feelings. The relationship between the Narrator and Tyler is fascinating to watch grow, erode, and become more and more of a puzzle until the final twist is revealed.


Oh, what a beauty of a twist.


The dialogue is witty, intelligent, and at times even charming. Carter, Norton, and Pitt are all excellent. Pitt even had some of his front teeth chipped for the movie which gives me the willies to even think about. They were repaired afterwards, but still...erghhh! This is certainly one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time. It is not for the sensitive soul, but certainly it is about much, much more than fighting. Superb!

When Tom (Ethan Hawke) arrives in Paris, he is not running away from something as much as he is running toward something. After a mental breakdown that resulted in time spent in a mental ward? prison? he is in Paris looking to reunite with his family. When his wife sees him at her door, she tries to reason with him, reminding him of the restraining order against him, but with his erratic behavior she is quickly on the phone to the police.


<b>All he wants to do is see his daughter.</b>


He runs away and jumps on a bus. He is exhausted and falls asleep. When he is shaken awake, everything he owns, including his money, has been stolen. At this point the director, Pawel Pawlikowski, takes us to an area of Paris that we never see. It is the dirty, grimy, industrial side of the city and where the immigrants can afford to live. Tom stops in a cafe and finds enough coins in his pocket to buy a cup of coffee. He asks the pretty Polish waitress Ania (Joanna Kulig) if there are any rooms available. She points him to owner. In exchange for his passport, Sezer lets him stay in a dingy, small room upstairs.


Of course, no one does anything for nothing. I wondered at this point exactly what Sezer had in mind for our desperate and lonely protagonist.


Tom is recognized in a bookstore as the author of one slender volume of prose. He is invited to an artist and writer party. He accepts, although reluctantly. We can tell he is uneasy about interacting with people, and soon after arriving, we can almost feel his agitation. (I’ve felt this way many times myself at social events, so he had my sympathy.) To relax and to get away from the press of people who are trying so hard to be interesting, he escapes to the balcony of the apartment, and there he meets Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas). He’d caught glimpses of her as he walked around the party. There is an immediate electric attraction between them. Her repartee with him on the balcony only adds to her allure. She is elegant, intelligent, and mysterious. She gives him her phone number knowing he won’t ask for it.


Tom’s efforts, if you call them that, to find a job are fruitless. Sezer offers him an unusual job as a gatekeeper in a faceless, ugly building. He is locked in a room. His only job is to buzz people in and only if they give him the proper code. We never do find out what exactly is going on in that building, but from the sounds that we are allowed to hear, we can guess that whatever they are doing it is probably not exactly legal. With the long hours of no responsibilities, it is the perfect setup for Tom to get back to writing another novel.


He is a maelstrom of emotion, obsessing about his daughter and worrying that he has probably lost her forever. He spends the time writing a long rambling illustrated letter to her.


His loneliness weighs heavily on him. He finally gives in and calls Margit. She invites him to her apartment on the 5th Arrondissement. She treats him with kindness, has sex with him, talks with him about his problems, and takes an interest in his life...maybe too much of an interest.


She becomes an addiction for him. When he can’t see her, he is agitated and lost.


Meanwhile, the lovely Ania has found a copy of his book. She has read it and loved it. She is a male (some female too) writer’s fantasy! She reads pieces of his book to him. He reads pieces to her. You can probably guess where this is going. The problem, of course, is that she is the girlfriend of Sezer. If he finds out that Tom has been intimate with Ania, ...well...my speculations about what would happen are fairly graphic.


There is a scene that I thought was done so well during one of the times that Tom goes to see Margit. She stops him just inside the door, and she starts giving him a handjob. He tries to kiss her, but she dodges away. He can’t touch her. All he can do is gaze into her enigmatic, gorgeous eyes (this is Kristin Scott Thomas after all) and enjoy the moment. It illustrates so well her complete control over him.


I caught just a short segment of this movie over lunch one day and decided that I had to see the rest. I’m a big fan of Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, so what a bonus for me to see them interact in a movie together. The movie hinges on the ability of Hawke to convey the desperation and loneliness of his character. He completely convinces me.


I read the book by WIlliam Kennedy before watching the movie, and this is one of those few times where the book and movie are both really good. There are slight deviations from the plot, but not enough to bother those purists who like to see books they’ve enjoyed brought to the screen fully realized. The plot has a wonderful twist. The subplots are all explained. Everything flows together towards a satisfying, perfect conclusion.