Sun, surf, serial slaughter (4/24/01)
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The Widow Of St. Pierre. [Patrice Leconte, 2000. Written by Claude Faraldo.]
A French colony on the bleak northern Canadian coast, circa 1850, is shocked when Very Large Person Emir Kusturica gets shitfaced one evening and commits a senseless murder; the civil authorities, less concerned with life and death among the little people than with maintaining the appearance of a firm hand on the tiller, condemn him to death; but then realize to their embarrassment that they have to mail-order a guillotine from the home office, which is sure to take months. In the meantime they hand the penitent, indeed now docile, Kusturica over to military commander Daniel Autueil for safekeeping, with the unanticipated consequence that the Captain’s do-gooder wife Juliette Binoche adopts the prisoner as a project and starts towing him around the colony like a pet bear, training him to perform good deeds. This experiment in rehabilitation meets with remarkable success, and in due course Kusturica marries, expects a child, saves a woman from a runaway house [no, really], and is embraced by his fellows [the bigshots naturally excepted] as a model citizen; with the result that when the guillotine finally does arrive, the lines are clearly drawn between the civil authorities and the necessity of saving face on the one hand, and the Captain, his wife, the people, and human decency and the possibility of redemption on the other. No surprise who wins out in the end.
The French authorities, as is usual in nineteenth century fiction, come off looking like a bunch of assholes; since this story is based on actual court records, it’s probably safe to assume that this is because they really were a bunch of assholes. — A real downer of a story, and, in view of the setting, a fairly dark and dismal piece of photography: no light seems to fall upon the filmstock at this latitude. — But it could be worse [as Marty Feldman would have said]; it could be a teen comedy starring Freddie Prinze Jr.
____________A man and his mullet (4/11/01)
